Ivi PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



tology that tlie second edition of Mr. Morris's Catalogue of British 

 Fossils, on which he has been so long and laboriously employed, and 

 respecting which my predecessor in this chair so fully expatiated last 

 year, has been at length published. Its contents fully justify those 

 remarks. Independently of the vastly increased number of species 

 recorded in this volume as compared with the first edition, the addition 

 of synonyms which the author has given in a great majority of in- 

 stances has infinitely increased its value ; and yet even in this respect 

 much still remains to be done, which I trust the author will not 

 forget when he shall be called on for another edition. 



Foreign Geology. 



Since the publication of his great work ' Siluria,' Sir R. Murchison 

 has again visited some of the Palaeozoic formations in the north of 

 Germany, of which he proposes to give a full account to the Society, 

 in continuation, as it were, of his fourteenth chapter, in which he 

 has discussed the Primseval Succession of Rocks in Germany. A 

 short account of his recent observations, made in company with Mr. 

 Morris, was laid before the Geological Section of the British Asso- 

 ciation during the last meeting at Liverpool, from which I make the 

 following extracts. After alluding to M. Barrande's great work on 

 the Silurian System of Bohemia, so ably described by my predecessor 

 in this chair last year, the author stated that in the Southern Thii- 

 ringer Wald, and in parts of Saxony further east, the great unfossili- 

 ferous base (chloritic and quartzose grauwacke slate) is succeeded in 

 ascending order by Lower Silurian beds, described as such by 

 Naumann, Geinitz, Richter, Engelhardt, and other local geologists, 

 because it is charged with Nereites, Graptolites, Ogygia^ and other 

 Silurian fossils, which occur in black slates, with some limestone and 

 shale, Mr. Salter, having examined the fossils, stated that one of 

 the remarkable Annelides was identical with a species which Professor 

 Harkness had discovered in the Lammermuir Hills, and that even the 

 Vrotovirgularia of the same tract of Scotland occurs also in Thii- 

 ringia. As several of the species of Graptolites of the two countries 

 are identical, there can be little doubt that the Lower Silurian of 

 Saxony is the equivalent of the graptolitic series of Dumfries and 

 Kirkcudbright. Here the ascending series in the Thiiringer Wald 

 ceases, there being no traces of Upper Silurian or even of Lower 

 Devonian. The Lower Silurian rocks are t?iere at once covered by 

 the Upper Devonian, viz. the Cypridina-schist and the Clymenia- 

 limestone ; and these are surmounted by a considerable expansion of 

 the Lower Carboniferous strata, viz. micaceous brown and yellowish 

 sandstones, with plants well known in the deposits of that age. 



The sedimentary rocks of the Hartz, the chief object of their visit 

 this year, and which Professor Sedgwick and one of the authors had 

 examined together on two previous occasions in 1828 and 1839, are so 

 dislocated and are so often inverted in position, that their physical order 

 can but seldom be detected amid the confusion which has been pro- 

 duced by the eruption of granites, porphyries, diorites, hypersthenic 



