530 Life of Joachim Barrande. 
interest (as a trained engineer by profession) in a horse-railway then 
in course of construction along the river Beraun to the Radnitz Coal- 
basin, and to Pilsen. Following the line he discovered in the inclined 
slaty rocks near Skrej and Tejrovic a most interesting quarry, rich 
in the primordial fauna of Bohemia. His attention had, however 
(writes Prof. Krejci), been previously attracted to fossil-remains 
in a walk through a little ravine at Zlichov, where he obtained an 
Orthoceras and the fragment of a Trilobite (Dalmanites). 
The discovery of these fossils, and the examination of the small 
collection in the Bohemian Museum formed by Count Sternberg and 
Prof. Zippe, incited Barrande to commence the systematic study of 
fossil remains and their distribution in the various strata of Central 
Bohemia, and to publish the results. He had already become 
acquainted with the researches of Murchison and other geologists 
in England during his visit to that country ; and when Murchison 
proposed the name “ Silurian System,” in the Philosophical Magazine 
for 1835, Barrande was one of the first Continental Geologists to 
apply it to the Transition rocks of Bohemia. 
The sight of a copy of Murchison’s “Silurian System” (published 
in 1839) in Vienna caused Barrande to resolve from: that time to 
devote himself to the examination, description, and illustration of 
the fossils of Bohemia, a task which he continued with unabated 
energy for 43 years, until his death in October last. 
The area to which Barrande devoted himself, and which forms the 
classic ground of his ‘‘Systéme Silurien du Centre de la Bohéme,” is 
about 140 square miles in extent, and, looked upon from the stand- 
point of Geology and Paleontology, was a veritable terra-incogmita. 
Until the date of Barrande’s first publication in 1846, no attention 
had been paid to stratigraphical geology and paleontology in 
Bohemia; Prof. Zippe, whose researches were published in 1831, 
having devoted himself entirely to the Mineral aspect of Geology." 
This neglect of stratigraphical geology was no doubt due to the 
powerful influence exercised by Prof. Mohs over Zippe and his ~ 
other pupils, which led them to study Crystallography and Miner- 
alogy, rather than stratigraphical geology, then but little understood 
or cared for. 
Even Corda, the able Curator of the Prague Museum (just before 
Barrande had published his Bobemian Trilobites), proved to his 
own satisfaction that the Fauna of the Transition rocks of Bohemia 
was only local, and that from it neither its relative age nor its dis- 
tribution could be determined.’ 
But all these and similar geological heresies vanished before the 
ray of scientific sunshine which Barrande cast upon it by his in- 
vestigations and researches. From 1840 Barrande devoted all his 
time and resources to the investigation of the Silurian System of 
Bohemia, especially to the task of describing, naming, and figuring 
the abundant series of fossils which his labours had brought to light. 
In the summer months of the years 1840-50 he travelled on foot 
1 See ‘‘ Uebersicht der Gebirgsformationen in Bohmen,’’ 1831. 
2 See his Prodrom einer Monographie der Béhmischer Trilobiten, 1847. 
