322 Rev. A. Irving — The Permian-Trias Question. 



them from seeing so clearly as they otherwise might do the full 

 bearing of the evidence which we possess. I have thought, there- 

 fore, that at the present juncture it would be useful if one gave a 

 short historical resume of a few facts, taken partly from the intro- 

 duction to Geinitz's great Monograph on the Dyas. The title of this 

 work is of importance as an index of the stage at which the battle 

 between the followers of Mi;rchison in this country and the 

 advocates of what we may call German views had arrived in the 

 year 1862, when Geinitz's great work was published in Leipzig. 

 Some years before this, Murchison had propounded his view of a 

 " Palceozoic Trias " in his Siluria, and subsequently he went over 

 a good portion of Central Germany with Prof. Morris, and on 

 his return gave to the Geological Society his long paper on the 

 Thiiringen and Hartz country. This appeared in the " Quarterly 

 Journal" in the year 1855. These two (the paper just referred to and 

 Siluria) being in English are readily accessible to every English 

 geologist ; they have been referred to more at length by me in the 

 long paper which appeared in the pages of this Magazine in the 

 year 1882. Any one who will take the trouble to read the joint 

 paper by Murchison and Morris will see plainly enough that in 

 Germany, the Triassic system had been worked out before this by 

 native geologists. It had by them (without exception, so far as I 

 am aware) been made to include all the sandy and marly beds 

 down to the dolomitic series of the Zechstein. When Murchison 

 came upon the field, therefore, with his ready-made " Permian 

 System " imported from Eussia, it was from his side that aggression 

 (if any there was) must be considered as having come. Geinitz's 

 work had not yet appeared ; but the materials for it were being 

 collected, and the German geologists seem to have been pretty 

 unanimous and clear in their ideas of the set of beds which remained 

 to be described between the Carboniferous series and the Trias, 

 as they understood the latter term. These remarks prepare us to 

 understand the title of Geinitz's work as it appeared in 1862. 

 It runs thus : — Dyas, oder die Zeclisteinformation mid Eothliegende 

 {Permisclie Formation zum Theil). 



The author does not raise the question of the value of the " Per- 

 mian System " as applied to the Kussian strata ; he merely points 

 out that in treating of the Dyas, he has rejected from his system the 

 Bunter- and Mergel-Schiefer, which no German geologist had ever 

 thought of bracketing with the Zechstein and Eothliegende, until 

 it had been suggested by Murchison, so that the Dyas is a part only 

 of the " Permian System." In his " Introduction," Geinitz ex- 

 presses his obligations to Murchison's works, especially to Siluria 

 and his Geology of Eussia ; but he dissents entirely from the view 

 maintained by Murchison of a " Palasozoic Trias," including within 

 it the Bunter-Schiefer. Geinitz points out that the so-called Bunter- 

 schiefer do not belong to the end of the Dyas-period, but more pro- 

 perly to the beginning of the Trias ; for (1) the deposition of these 

 strata " first began after the upper layers of the Dyas were already 

 hardened, fissured, and partly destroyed." (2) "The boundary 



