Murchison’s Siluria. 403 
The Carboniferous rocks, so elaborately and usefully developed 
in the British Isles, have been already well investigated by man 
writers, particularly by Professor Phillips, and have been found 
to extend, like the Silurian and Devonian, over immense regions 
in all quarters of the globe 
the base. But extended researches have shown from the charac- 
ter of its imbedded remains, that it is linked to the carboniferous 
deposit on which it rests, and is entirely distinct from the Trias, 
or New Red Sandstone, which, overlying it, forms the base of 
all the secondary rocks. The chief calcareous member of this 
Permian group was termed in England the Magnesian Limestone, 
_in Germany the “ Zechstein ;” but as magnesian limestones are 
of all ages, and as the German “ Zechstein” is but a part of a 
group, the other members of which are known as ‘ Kupfer- 
schiefer” (copper slate), ‘Rothe todte liegende” (the Lower 
New Red of English geologists), &c., it was manifest that a sin- 
gle name for the whole was much needed. _ After showing how 
nine years which have elapsed since the issue of that work, con- 
siderable additions have been made to our knowledge, and all of 
them sustain the truth of our generalization. We then scarcely 
knew of the existence of true Silurian deposits in Germany ; 
hearly all the greywacke of the Rhenish provinces and the Hartz 
* See Russia in Europe and the Ural Mountains, vol. i, p. 64. 
+ “Penéen” of D’Omalius d'Halloy. (See Chapter 12.) 
