304 Viscount (I'Archiac and M. de Verneuil 



deposits, and we had proposed to commence the description of them, when one of 

 us was induced by Mr. Murchison to accompany him to the Rhenish provinces and 

 there examine some of the fossihferous beds, with the stratigraphical position of 

 which Professor Sedgwick and himself had become famiUar. 



These gentlemen had already surveyed the Fichtelgebirge, the Hartz, Westpha- 

 lia, the Eifel, Belgium, &c. ; and, enabled by a long and careful examination of 

 the Silurian and Cambrian deposits in England, to unravel the frequently tangled 

 thread of the true succession of these ancient deposits, they had already com- 

 pared and placed in the relative positions the greater part of the ancient deposits 

 of Germany, and thus held, as it were, the key to the principal divisions which 

 might be established among them. It was then, that they proposed to us to 

 unite our efforts with theirs, and to accompany the new classification of the 

 Palaeozoic rocks of the Continent with the description of the fossils of these depo- 

 sits ; a proposition which we could not but accept, and with the greater readiness, 

 since the larger part of our fossils had been collected in the provinces of the right 

 bank of the Rhine, precisely where these gentlemen had found the greatest mass of 

 normal facts suitable to be used as the basis of other approximations. This con- 

 currence of circumstances, already so much in our favour, added still more value 

 to our palseontological researches, inasmuch as the place assigned to our fossils in 

 the series of beds was much more precise, and in relation with geological divisions 

 deduced from other considerations. 



Such was the object we at first proposed to attain, but which the more profound 

 study of our subject has extended, even to a degree that we had not foreseen. 

 Prof. Sedgwick and Mr. Murchison, in order to establish their classification in 

 Western Germany, had commenced from a foundation laid by them in the west of 

 England, and it was by analogies which they discovered in the succession of the 

 deposits in the Rhenish provinces, that they assigned to them, as well as to those 

 of the Eifel and Belgium, the true places in the series. This proceeding, so rational 

 on geological considerations, ought, we conceived, to be followed still more closely 

 in the study of the fossils ; and we devoted ourselves to a careful examination of 

 every published work relating to this part of the science, at first in the country 

 itself by de Hiipsch, Blumenbach, Schlotheim, Kloden, Goldfuss, Beyrich, Bronn, 

 and Hermann von Meyer ; then in the West, upon the Eifel, by Steininger ; upon 

 Belgium by Morren, Davreux, Dumont, and de Koninck ; upon the various parts 

 of the British Isles by Martin, Fleming, Miller, Sowerby, Phillips, Murchison, 

 Lonsdale, &c. In the East the works of Pusch, Zenke, and Sternberg, also of 

 Count Miinster upon the Fichtelgebirge and the environs of Elbersreuth, claimed 

 our particular attention. It was no less necessary to consult those of Wahlenberg, 

 Dalman, Hisinger, and Boek upon the ancient deposits of Scandinavia and its 

 dependent islands ; and further still, the writings of de Buch upon Silesia and 



