﻿Ixxxiv PROCEEDINGS OP THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I908 



geological literature. The sagacity of its reasoning has in recent 

 years been triumphantly demonstrated by the deep borings in 

 Xent, which have brought to light the actual existence of Coal- 

 ]Measures beneath the Secondary formations of the south-eastern 

 counties. 



Por many years after the foundation of the Geological Society, 

 that portion of the stratified rocks of this country which lies between 

 the top of the Coal-Measares and the bottom of the Lias was 

 regarded as a single connected series of deposits, generally known 

 as the Xew Eed Sandstone, in contradistinction to the mass of red 

 sandstones beneath the Carboniferous System. The first and most 

 masterly essay on these rocks was Sedgwick's great memoir on the 

 Magnesian Limestone, which fills nearly ninety pages of the third 

 volume of the second series of the Transactions, issued in 1835. 

 In this remarkable paper the distribution was described of the 

 various subdivisions of the series, which the anther had traced with 

 great personal labour over a large extent of country, and their 

 general sequence was for the first time worked out in detail. A 

 parallelism was then established between them and their equivalent 

 groups on the Continent, and thus a basis and a starting-point were 

 fixed for all subsequent research in this department of British 

 Geology. Some years later, after the term ' Permian ' had been 

 introduced by Murchison as one of the results of his Eussian 

 travels, the so-called ' jSTew Red Sandstone ' of England was divided 

 into two portions : the lower being named Permian and assigned to 

 the top of the Palaeozoic Systems; while the upper took the German 

 title of Trias, and was regarded as the lowest member of the 

 Mesozoic series of formations.^ The line of division between the 

 strata thus separated from each other is in this country often 

 indefinable, and some geologists have been disinclined to recognize 

 its existence. But the trend of the palseontological evidence in its 

 favour was eventually allowed to prevail. The papers of J. W. Xirkby 

 which appeared in the Quarterly Journal from 1857 onward, and 

 his monograph published by the Palaeontographical Society, had 

 much influence in procuring the admission of the Permian as a 



^ This re-arrangement in the classification of the geological record was not 

 made without calling forth protests, and Murchison & De Verneuil, after 

 their first communication of the results of their journeys in Russia to the 

 Society in the spring of 1841 (Proc. vol. iii, p. 398), had to return to the subject 

 three years later and vindicate the claims of their Permian System to re- 

 cognition as part of the Palaeozoic series of formations (Proc. vol. iv, p. 327). 



