258 Letter from Sir R. I Murchison on Marcou’s Dyas, etc. 
posing the views of an author who considers such fossils to be 
the remains of “precocious beings”—the ‘precursors’ or ‘ad- 
vanced guard’ of the secondary or Mesozoic populations !” 
remain gentlemen, your very obedient servant, 
RopeErick I. MURCHISON. 
Geologieal Survey Office, London, July 25th, 1859. 
ogie’ of d’Omalius, published in 1831, I found that although 
(p. 276) that his name Penéen was intended as a French transla- 
tion of Roht-todt-liegende, the examples of which rock, best — 
known to the Nestor of Belgian geologists, near Malmedy, are 
indeed quite sterile, as I know from personal examination long 
before I visited Russia. 2 
The following is the summary of Mr, Marcou, called for in 
the last paragraph of Sir R. I. Murchison’s letter.—Eps. 
“In the ‘New Red’ as well as in all other great epochs, we 
remark that the lower beds (the lKoth-liegende) contain Car- 
boniferous forms of life—a kind of ‘rear guard’ of the popula- 
tions whose destruction had commenced, indicating that there 
to become the spectato ut isola ; 
new generations, which, although composed of beings somewhat 
