﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. xlv 



ontological anomaly. When Sir R. Murchison and M. Escher, in 

 a late survey of the Alps, observed a mass of limestone full of Juras- 

 sic fossils, a quarter of a mile long, resting unconformably on strata 

 of the eocene or nummulitic group, in the Canton of Berne and the 

 Grisons, they preferred to imagine any amount of folding of strata 

 and of lateral displacement, rather than believe that an oolitic fauna 

 with its Ammonites and other fossils had re-appeared on the earth 

 after the older tertiary formations were deposited*. In like manner, 

 when I visited the Danish island of Moen in 1836, and found the 

 northern or glacial drift extensively interstratified with white chalk, 

 of which a faithful and more detailed description has just been pub- 

 lished by M. Puggaard, I stated in your Transactions that we were jus- 

 tified in assuming any amount of engulfment, contortion, or " entangle- 

 ment" of the beds of the two formations, rather than believe the drift 

 to have been contemporaneous with the white chalk and its flints f. In 

 such cases it depends entirely upon the degree of our faith in the con- 

 stancy of palseontological results, whether we attach a greater or less 

 importance to superposition ; and, consistently with this principle, 

 geologists who have regarded the coal-plants and Belemnites of the 

 Tarantaise as belonging to the same group, have laboured to show that 

 the anachronism would not be so great, because the longevity of species 

 in fossil plants, say they, exceeds that which obtains in the mollusca. 

 Thus, the Catamites arenaceus is said to afford an example of a plant 

 common to the coal-measures and the trias ; but this, I believe, is 

 incorrect, for this species, Mr. Morris tells me, was admitted into Mr. 

 Prestwich's list of fossils from the coal-measures of Coalbrook Dale by 

 mistake ; and even were it true that the range of this and several other 

 species was occasionally so great as to extend from the coal to the trias, 

 or from the trias to the oolite, such cases would afford no parallel to 

 the pretended occurrence in the Alps of a large assemblage of plants 

 proper to the coal in the midst of a Jurassic fauna. 



Some years after the publication in 1828 of M. Brongniart's first 

 list of plants from the Alpine anthracite, that botanist had an oppor- 

 tunity of studying a still larger number of species from the same for- 

 mation, so as to raise the number to forty, yet they all of them were 



* Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. v. p. 246. 



f Trans. Geol. Soc. Ser. 2. vol. ii. p. 257 ; see Puggaard, Moens Geologie, 

 pp. 118-134 (1851). 



