272 Rev. A. Irving — On the Permian and Trias. 



as that given by M. d'Acy and other continental inquirers. He also 

 postulates as necessary to account for its distribution a great flood of 

 waters. His words are, " It may also be well imagined how, in this 

 pounding back of the waters, the coarser and heavier materials 

 would be collocated, just as we now find them, and how the stiff 

 loam resulting from the final settlement of the smaller particles of 

 matter in the turbid water would naturally form the covering of the 

 stony debris. . . . The abundance of bones in such hollows can be 

 only, I imagine, satisfactorily explained by supposing that the 

 animals were drifted into these depressions and entombed beneath 

 the masses of detritus " {id. p. 378). Mr. Mackie, in his account of 

 the well-known deposit at Folkestone, tells us how the " lower portion 

 of it contains a considerable number of the remains of Elephant, 

 Ox, Stag, Hygena, Hippopotamus, Irish Deer, etc., and in the marly 

 portion {i.e. the upper layer) numerous specimens of two or three 

 species of Helix. No fluviatile molluscs have as yet been found. The 

 bones and shells are found both in the gravel and in the calcareous 

 marl above it." Mr. Mackie also says, " The whole of the bone bed 

 appears to have been subject to the action of water, as the flints and 

 grit boulders, although angular, are partially worn {i.e. like the 

 diluvium rouge of the French writers), and the chalk nodules and 

 softer pebbles are completely rounded. The stratification also of the 

 marl sand and boulders follows the irregularities of the Lower 

 Greensand on which it rests " {id. p. 260). 



Wherever we turn, it seems that the loamy deposits of Central 

 Europe bear one consistent testimony to the existence of a vast 

 translating wave of waters which closed the Mammoth period, and 

 which I have designated the Great Post-Glacial Flood. In another 

 paper I hope to deal with the evidence of the Valley Terraces. 



VI. — On the Classification of the European Eocks known as 



Permian and Trias. 



By the Eev. A. Irving, B.Sc, B.A., F.G.S. ; 



Senior Science Master of Wellington College. 

 {Continued from p. 223.) 



ANY geologist who has spent a short time at Eisenach, and has 

 examined any of the numerous road- and hill-side sections in the 

 district about the celebrated Wartburg, must have been struck, as I 

 was myself several years ago, with the enormous development of 

 the breccias and conglomerates interbedded with well-stratified sand- 

 stones and marls ; and this district is fairly typical of the Thiiringer- 

 wald. For an account of these the reader must be referred to Siluria, 

 to the paper by Murchison and Morris before mentioned, and to 

 Credner. The former writers remark: "The movements by which 

 the great brecciated masses were aggregated were clearly suspended 

 and repeated many times ; the intervals of quiescence allowing of 

 those deposits of finely triturated red sand and marl which alternate 

 with the coarse and subangular conglomerates. , . . These breccias 

 and conglomerates, with their associated sandstones, are of gigantic 

 dimensions, and have been bored into in fruitless searches after coal 



