374 Notices of Memoirs — Prof, T. Rupert Jones. 



away, to be buried beneath like material again and again, jungle on 

 jungle, time after time, as the lagoon became a marsh, the marsh a 

 forest, the forest a ruin of trees, silted up with river mud, and buried 

 beneath sea sand, but succeeded again by marsh, and soil, and trees. 

 The streams played their part in this old land. It was rich with trees 

 and ferns, and the great congeners of our small club-mosses and 

 horsetails, and furnished with land-snails, myriapods, arachnids, and 

 insects in abundance ; reptiles too, great and various, were there, 

 and possibly birds and mammals. The stream cutting through the 

 older beds of peat and the coal brought down the tribute of the higher 

 ground, flooded the forests and gradually filled the sunken areas. 

 Basins also, barred off from the sea by shingle banks, were thus made 

 into brackish lagoons, full of marsh-plants, and alive with reptile, 

 fish, crustacean and mollusc, that made the foul water and black mud 

 their home. 



In the " Eothliegende " of the Permian Series we again find 

 EstJieria and Dreissena-like Molluscs that indicate brackish habitats. 

 The Permian breccia of Worcestershire has been referred to a glacier 

 for its origin ; and so also some of the conglomerates of the Old Eed 

 series, and even of the Cambrian, have been thought to have origi- 

 nated in such an ice-river of the ancient lands. 



In the New Eed Sandstone series of Germany the shaly coal, called 

 " Lettenkohle," is of fresh- water origin ; and the same Estheria 

 minuta that abounds therein occur also in the " Keuper " or Upper 

 New Eed of Worcestershire, with fragmentary plant-remains. In 

 the succeeding Eheetic strata the influence of occasional rivers and 

 lakes is seen in the drifted land plants and insects, and the interpo- 

 lated Estherian beds of Grloucestershire, Somersetshire, and else- 

 where. The Lias of the Banat (Austria) has abundance of terrestrial 

 plants, forming a coal ; but here in the west the fossil trees and 

 leaves of the Lias are but waifs and strays, and were washed to sea 

 with the bones of the gi'eat Scelidosaurus ; and the sudden river 

 floods must have killed by the million successive generations of 

 fishes, Ammonites, and Belemnites, and buried them in thick new 

 mud, together with the unhurt carcases of the associated Ichthyo- 

 saur and Plesiosaur. These last have their skin and bowels intact ; 

 the molluscs were imbedded with the animal in the shell, and the 

 cuttles retain even their inkbags unemptied, for death was quicker 

 than their fear. Melting snow produces such sudden floods in tem- 

 perate climates, and the monsoons on the eastern coast of India sup- 

 ply such abundance of fresh water, as to kill the sea-fish in myriads. 



During the time that the Oolitic formations were being laid down, 

 some rivers ran into the sea from the west (the direction that all the 

 older rivers also had in this region probably, as the old land lay 

 where the North Atlantic and parts of North America are now), and 

 we find traces of their influence in the Brora coal and the Moorland 

 coal of Yorkshire, and further south in the plant-bearing sandy 

 shales of Collyweston, and in somewhat similar laminated oolite at 

 Stonesfield. In the last-named beds, which supply a roofing-stone, 

 bones of land animals have long been known to occur, especially the 



