older Deposits of the North of Germany and Belgium. 287 



beds : and in one or two places which we examined, the beds of meagre shale and reddish grits, though 

 containing coal plants and alternating with thin bands of coal, seemed in a great measure to be made up 

 of recomposed trap. 



This Quarzfreier Porphyr is therefore unquestionably of a newer date than most 

 of the trappean masses above alluded to ; and it is regarded by Von Buch and some 

 German geologists of high authority as a manifestation of those subterranean forces 

 which produced the last great elevation of the Hartz, and gave the present strike 

 and impress to the secondary system by which the chain is surrounded. We were 

 disposed to regard the granite as the indication of the great moving power in ele- 

 vating the chain ; and we thought our views confirmed by the complete inversion, 

 not merely of the older rocks, but of the whole secondary series (including red 

 sandstone, muschelkalk, greensand and chalk), in the neighbourhood of Goslar. 

 But the subject is one of the greatest complexity, and we do not venture to op- 

 pose our opinions to those of Von Buch, Hausmann, or any of the geologists who 

 have described the igneous rocks of the north of Germany in such admirable detail. 

 One thing at least is certain, that the formations of the Hartz must have under- 

 gone many movements ; and the position of the surrounding strata seems to prove 

 that the whole chain must have had a great movement en masse, since the period 

 of the secondary deposits (see PL XXIII. fig. 17). 



It is demonstrated, by the sections, that the strike and flexures of the grauwacke 

 were effected before the existence of the overlying coal and rothliegendes. On the 

 contrary, we have shown that in Belgium and Westphalia the strike and flexures 

 of the grauwacke are propagated into the coal formation. Are we then to believe 

 that the causes which produced the peculiar physical impress on the vast series 

 of strata in the Rhenish provinces, belonged to a different period from that during 

 which the strike and contortions of the Hartz were effected ? We answer this 

 question in the negative, believing that the older rocks of the Hartz and the Rhe- 

 nish provinces compose but one system, made up of similar component parts, 

 which have been similarly acted on and dislocated at the same periods of time : 

 and we escape from this apparent contradiction by supposing that the coal mea- 

 sures of Westphalia and Belgium are an older part of the series than the coal mea- 

 sures of the Hartz. Indeed we regard the coal-beds on the flanks of the Hartz as 

 the very highest part of the carboniferous series, just where it alternates with and 

 passes into the bottom beds of the new red system ; and by no means as represent- 

 ing the whole carboniferous system. On this view there is no contradiction in our 

 previous conclusions*. 



* We consider the coal-beds associated with the rothliegendes of the Hartz to represent the thin bands 

 of upper coal which alternate with the bottom beds of the new red sandstone series in Shropshire, Staf- 

 fordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. Between the rothliegendes and the old red sandstone of 



2 p2 



