ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. Ixui 



3rd Zone. — Russ-coal beds, peculiarly characterized by an abun* 

 dance of Calamites, — therefore called Calamite-coal. 



4th Zone. — Oberholmdorf and Ilmenau, the peculiar feature of 

 which is the great abundance of Ferns, — therefore called Fern-coal. 



M. Rossler of Hanau, Director of the Wctterau Society of Natural 

 History, who has for many years directed his attention to the sub- 

 ject, has given a short notice on the organic remains of the Zechstein, 

 or Magnesian Limestone, in the Wetterau, in the last Annual Report 

 of that Society ; and Prof. Reuss of Prague has, in the same volume, 

 described the Entomostraca and Foraminifera which occur in the 

 same formation. 



On the Position of the Fossiliferous beds ofSati Casciano. — Much 

 has been done, during the past year, to remove the great uncertainty 

 which has long prevailed as to the precise position to be assigned to 

 the fossils found in the San Casciano beds. This difficulty has 

 arisen partly from the fossils themselves, many of which are peculiar 

 to these beds, and partly from the singular intermixture of forms 

 which has been found amongst them. In consequence of these 

 anomalies, the geologists who visited the district (and amongst them 

 are many of the most distinguished, both of our own countrymen 

 and of foreigners) have come to various conclusions as to their true 

 position in the somewhat complicated series of Alpine stratification. 

 While some wished to place them in one or other of the formations 

 of the Triassic system, others referred them as unhesitatingly to the 

 overlying Lias, and not even to the lowest beds of this system, some 

 even going so far as to refer beds now ascertained to belong to this 

 San Casciano series to the Brown Jura*. 



The exertions of Sir R. Murchison went far to disperse the mists 

 which hung over this subject. In his paper " On the Geological 

 Structure of the Alps, Apennines, and Carpathians," read before this 

 Society in 1848, he states that this obscurity has been principally 

 cleared away by the memoir of M. Emmerich, who, working out the 

 details of a district rendered classical twenty-five years before by the 

 researches of Leopold v. Buch, has clearly exposed the order of the 

 strata ; thus leaving little or no doubt that the chief and peculiar 

 group of fossils of those Alps (Southern Tyrol) belongs to the 

 Trias. 



The researches of other geologists, and particularly of some of 

 the Austrians attached to the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna, 

 amongst whom I may mention MM. v. Hauer and Siiss, have esta- 

 blished the existence, in the Salzburg Alps, of fossils identical with 

 those which occur in South Tyrol ; thus establishing, as Sir R. 

 Murchison observes in the paper already quoted, the existence of true 

 Muschelkalk types in the northern zone, where they had not before 

 been recognized. 



In a memoir on the Triassic, Liassic, and Jurassic formations 



* The " Brown Jura" of the Germans is represented in England by the Middle 

 and Lower Oolites, — from the Oxford Clay to the Inferior Oolite, inclusive. — See 

 Fraas on the Jurassic Series, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. viii. 2nd Part, Miscall, 

 pp. 42 e/ seq. 



