Williams! THE ORIGINAL CARBONIFEROUS. 79 



ley of the Trent." l It is composed " entirely of rocks belonging to the 

 Carboniferous series." 2 



H. B. Woodward, in " Geology of England and Wales" (1887), de- 

 scribes this range as " a faulted anticlinal of Lower Carboniferous rocks 

 supporting on the east the coal fields of Northumberland, Yorkshire, 

 and Derbyshire, and on the west the Lancashire and Cheshire coal 

 fields." 3 



As was pointed out by Conybeare, the rocks of this range not only 

 contain the typical rock formations to which he applied the name " Car- 

 boniferous order," but each of the members of that system. 



De la Beche (183L-1833) followed the classification of Conybeare, but 

 dropped the term "Medial" as a synonym. John Phillips (1837) adopted 

 the name "Carboniferous" with "system" instead of "order" in the 

 same sense as proposed by Conybeare. And Murchison, in the Silurian 

 system (1839), made classic the names "Silurian system," "Old Red 

 system," "Carboniferous system," "New Red system," and "Oolitic 

 system." 



After them, geologists in general adopted the name Carboniferous 

 system for one of the great groups of rocks composing the grand geolog- 

 ical column. 



All of these early English authors were in unison in distinctly exclud- 

 ing the rocks afterward (in 1841) called "Permian" by Murchison, and 

 at that time going under the names " New Red sandstone " and " Mag- 

 nesian limestone," " Saliferous system " and " New Red system." Cony- 

 beare, De la Beche, and John Phillips agreed in including the " Upper 

 OldRed sandstone" in the Carboniferous system, while Murchison, after 

 them (in 1839), separated from the Carboniferous the lower member as 

 a distinct system. On page 169 of his Silurian system he says that 

 he "applied the name 'Old Red system ' to the Old Red saudstone 

 of previous writers in order to convey a just conception of their 

 importance in the natural succession of rocks, and also to show that 

 as the Carboniferous system in which previous writers have merged 

 it * * * is surmounted by one red group, so is it underlaid by 

 another." 



Thus, all four of these early authorities in English geology agree in 

 their definition of the original Carboniferous system, which is that of 

 the series of rocks typically represented in the Pennine range of England, 

 and not fully represented in any other one section of England. 



When we seek to determine the precise definition of the Carboniferous 

 system, we are led directly to this typical section in the Pennine range, 

 first clearly defined by Conybeare, and afterward adopted as the typical 

 section by the founders of geological science in England, and afterward 

 by correlation recognized as the standard section of the Carboniferous 

 system throughout the world. The section of this typical Penuine Car- 



i Op. cit., p. 20. 2 Op. cit., p. 22. 8 Op. cit., p. 149. 



