322 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— C. 



geologists — the name is well established. And whatever its obscurities and difficulties 

 nobody denies that the system is represented, as in India, South Africa, Texas and 

 elsewhere, by rocks many thousands of feet in thickness, or that its fauna and iiora 

 are distinctive and important despite the fact that they may show gradual transitions 

 into faunas and floras which are older and younger than Permian. The period of 

 time, implicit in its rock accumulations, in its stratigraphical breaks and in the 

 evolution of its fossil organisms, is comparable in extent with that of other well- 

 established systems. 



The question of retaining the Permian as a separate and distinct system is inter- 

 national, and can only be satisfactorily decided by some representative international 

 body of geologists, after an exhaustive analysis of all the evidence, more especially in 

 those areas where the fossil faunas and floras are preserved most completely. 



In such an international symposium, what would be the attitude of British 

 geologists ? Dr. Sherlock, apparently, would advocate the abolition of the term 

 Permian, and after linking up the so-called Permian of the Midlands, for example, 

 with the Carboniferous he would unite the Permian of the north of England with the 

 Trias under a new system — the Epiric. Most British geologists, however, would 

 probably advocate the retention of the name Permian, so that the problem for us is 

 to decide what deposits must be included, how they are interrelated in different parts 

 of Britain, and what are the upper and lower limits of the system. 



In attempting to answer such questions I can here only refer briefly to the rocks 

 in the Midlands of England, to which Murchison gave the name Permian and which 

 were mapped in detail by Hull. Of Hull's three divisions of ' Salopian Permian,' 

 the lowest (Keele Beds) is generally agreed as belonging to the Carboniferous on 

 palaeobotanical and other grounds. The Middle or Calcareous Conglomerate and the 

 Upper or Trappoid Breccia divisions have recently been grouped under the term 

 Enville Beds by the Geological Survey, and provisionally put in the Carboniferous. 

 At the same time they class the Hopwas Breccia, which occurs at many places in 

 the Birmingham district immediately below the Bunter, with the Trias. So that, 

 according to the Geological Survey recent mapping, there remains no visible Permian 

 in the Midland area. 



I have much sympathy with the Survey in their anxiety to settle the systematic 

 position of these puzzling Midland rocks, for it is obviously necessary to have them 

 indicated on the official maps. It is to their credit, if I may venture to say so, that 

 they expressly admit the doubtful age of these Enville Beds in their recent maps and 

 memoirs dealing with the Birmingham district. But unfortunately in some more 

 recent Survey publications, and elsewhere, it has become the fashion already to refer 

 to the Enville Beds as definitely of Carboniferous age. Which only shows how great 

 is the responsibility of an official Geological Survey. What the Survey have done 

 has been to work upwards from proved Coal Measures until arrested by what they 

 regard as a considerable stratigraphical break, which happens to be at the base of 

 the Bunter, or in places at the base of the Hopwas Breccia. 



Yet we should always remember that up to the present there is no paleeontological 

 evidence for the Carboniferous age of the Enville Beds. What fossil evidence they 

 do yield in the shape of vertebrate footprints and skeletons points rather against 

 than for a Carboniferous age of these rocks. Moreover, an unconformity, however 

 useful and satisfying in map construction, is not necessarily a limit to a system, as 

 that term is generally understood. If it were, the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, 

 for example, would stand little chance of a separate existence. 



I do not believe, however, that the Enville Beds represent a continuous series of 

 deposits. There are probably many non-sequences in them, and at the base of the 

 Clent and Northfield Breccias, with their accompanying marls and sandstones, a 

 considerable overstep or unconformity exists. 



The period that intervened between the Upper Coal Measures and the Bunter was 

 probably of vast duration, and marked by the culmination of the great Hercyian and 

 Armorican mountain-making movements, accompanied throughout by erosion and 

 deposition of enormous masses of coarse red sandstones, conglomerates and breccias, 

 with local marls and fine sandstones in the shallow inland waters of low-lying basins. 

 Many thousands of feet of rock were removed by erosion during this period and much 

 of it must have been deposited in the Midland area. We now see exposed in outcrop 

 a mere vestige of it, for the greater part lies buried beneath the mantle of Trias and 

 other Mesozoic strata which floor the Midland Plain. 



