1855.] MURCHISON AND MORRIS THE HARZ. 429 



Zeclistein upwards, graduate insensibly by mineral characters into 

 the Lower or unfossiliferous Bunter, or the Uppermost Permian of 

 our sections. The next overlying mass, which we consider to be the 

 real Bunter, with its upper courses containing fossils, gypsum, and 

 some calcareous matter, forms the true natural-history base of the 

 original Trias. Then comes the Maschelkalk with its lower band of 

 thin wavy or undulating flaggy limestone, knovra as *' Wellenkalk," 

 its central mass with gypsum, and its superior division a limestone ; — 

 each locally characterized by certain species of fossils. Lastly, we 

 have the Keuper marls and sandstones, with a base called Letten- 

 Kohle (from certain thin layers of carbonaceous matter contained in 

 it), a middle band with gypsum, and a third or Upper Sandstone on 

 which the Lias rests. 



Whilst all this Triassic group has, through its imbedded fossils, 

 whether animal or vegetable, a community of character, the dominant 

 types being found in its great calcareous centre (including many Sau- 

 rians and Fishes and a rich invertebrate fauna), there are not in the 

 whole group any forms identical with what existed at the close of the 

 Palaeozoic sera. An entirely new creation succeeded in this first stage 

 of Mesozoic succession ; and yet this wonderful change in life was 

 unaccompanied by any visible interference vdth the regular increment 

 of submarine and estuary matter, and without any dislocations or 

 disturbances of the successive sea-bottoms in which the fossil animals 

 are imbedded. 



We have dwelt pointedly on this great feature of geology in other 

 works *, but we revert to it specially on this occasion, since, as far as 

 we know, there are no tracts in Europe in which the conformable 

 succession of the uppermost palseozoic and the lowest mesozoic, as 

 characterized by distinct relics, is so well exhibited as on the flanks 

 of the Thiiringerwald, and in the region lying between that chain and 

 the Harz, — a vast trough, in which the grand undulations of the 

 Trias are so clearly exposed. 



PART IL 



The Harz. — Long as the Harz Mountains have been explored by 

 naturalists, and well as their mineral composition and fractures are 

 known, through the labours of Von Buch, Hausmann, and others, 

 their true geological history is yet far from complete. Referring little 

 to the numerous mineralogists who formerly wrote on this small but 

 highly diversified excrescence on the surface of Northern Germany 

 before its palaeozoic classification was attempted, we can now do little 

 more than offer some additions to a memoir written in the year 1839, 

 and published in the Geological Transactions by Sedgwick and Mur- 

 chison. In that Memoir it was shown, for the first time, that a large 

 portion of its so-called "grauwacke and quartz rocks" was of no 

 higher antiquity than our British Lower Carboniferous deposits, and 

 was the true equivalent of the "Culm" series of schists, limestones, 

 and grits of Devonshire ; — that a great mass beneath the above, 



* See particularly * Russia in Europe,' vol. i. p. 582 ; * Siluria/ p. 464. 



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