Vice-President’s Address. 283 
Amphibia, the evolution of the Ammonites, in short, the 
incoming of the new order of life, which is so marked a 
feature of the paleontology of these rocks, and which has led 
systematists to make the great dividing line between the 
Deuterozoic Rocks and those of Neozoic age coincide with 
the base of our New Red. 
It is, of course, obvious that whatever time was required 
for the formation of Tyrolian Rocks, the same time must 
be required also for their British equivalents, the thin marine 
Rheetic Rocks and the 2500 feet of desert rocks which form the 
Upper New Red or Trias. Regarding the Panormian and its 
British equivalent, the Lower New Red or Dyas, I can offer 
no estimate; but as the sandstones of the Lower New Red 
were evidently formed under the same conditions as those of 
the Upper, we have to add on some unknown figure to the 
above. ‘This, in the present state of our knowledge, we may 
here leave out. 
Unconformity below the New Red in Britain—There can 
be no reasonable doubt that the base of the Upper New 
Red in Britain is contemporaneous with the base of the 
Upper New Red—and therefore of the Tyrolian—on the 
Continent. We have next to consider the relation of this 
base to the older rocks in Britain. Briefly, it may be stated 
to be one of considerable and extensive unconformity. Not 
only were the older rocks folded, contorted, and faulted, but 
they were afterwards subjected to enormous denudation. 
This certainly happened in the interval following the close 
of the Upper Carboniferous Period, and preceded the deposi- 
tion of the New Red itself. In the Bristol area the Upper 
New Red oversteps the denuded edges of the faulted and 
highly-disturbed rocks of Carboniferous age, as well as the 
whole of the Upper Old Red. There can be no question in 
this case of either non-deposition or of contemporaneous 
upheaval and denudation, as the Carboniferous strata are 
repeated on either limb of several anticlinals, and their strike 
is perfectly independent of that of the New Red. In this 
case, therefore, we have clear evidence of the removal by 
denudation of 15,000 feet of strata after the formation of the 
Upper Carboniferous Rocks, and before the deposition of the 
