GEOLOGICAL SKETCH. 9 
plants which occur in the Richmond coal basin would, however, have been 
sufficient to show the error of this opinion. 
Prof. Edward Hitchcock, who was one of the earliest to consider the 
subject, arrived at the conclusion that our Red Sandstone series was the 
equivalent of the New Red Sandstone of Europe. To this he was led 
mainly by the similarity of their lithological characters and their position 
relative to the Carboniferous rocks below and the Cretaceous above. He 
also mentions the discovery in these rocks of portions of a vertebrate 
skeleton which was not a fish, and he inferred from that fact that the series 
was Mesozoic, because at that time no animals of higher rank than fishes 
had been found in the Paleozoic rocks. We have since learned that am- 
phibians are common in the Coal Measures, and the remains of reptiles are 
not wanting. At the time Professor Hitchcock wrote, the Permian and the 
Trias were not separated, but both were included in the so-called New Red 
Sandstone. This term was used to designate the group which, containing’ 
much Red Sandstone, rests on the Carboniferous, and to distinguish it from 
the Old Red Sandstone below. 
So Professor Hitchcock supposed that we had in the rocks under con- 
sideration the equivalents of the Rotheliegende, as well as of the Bunter 
and the Keuper. The same view was taken later by Prof. Ebenezer Em- 
mons in his Geological Report of the Midland Counties of North Carolina, 
1856, page 275, receding from an earlier opinion (1853)—when he called 
the whole series Triassic—for the reason that in the lower portion of the 
Dan River section, North Carolina, he found the remains of Thecodont 
saurians. On the other hand, Profs. W. B. and H. D. Rogers were led by 
the general resemblance of the ferns and cycads of the Richmond basin to 
those of the Lias of Whitby, England, to consider these rocks Liassie, that 
is, Lower Jurassic. This view was also shared by Sir Charles Lyell when, 
in 1845, he visited the Richmond coal basin and collected a series of fossil 
plants, which were examined by C. J. F. Bunbury, who had given much 
attention to fossil botany." 
Prof. Jules Marcou, on his Geological Map of the United States, pub- 
lished in 1853, represents the New Red Sandstone of Virginia as Liassie, 
‘Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc. London, vol. 3, 1847, pp. 261-28. 
