256 C. SCHUCHBRT — LOWER II KLDERBERG-ORISKANY FORMATIONS 



contributed by d'Archiac and de Verneuil. In this classical work, a part of the 

 Taunus and Hunsriick was considered as Cambrian; the chief mass of the Schie- 

 fergebirge as Silurian; a smaller part, including the Eifel Limestone formation, as 

 Devonian; . . . but the classification of the older beds has needed consider- 

 able alteration. The merit of undertaking this necessary revision is due to the 

 ' Rheinischen Uebergangs-gebirges ' of Ferd. Roemer, appearing in 1844, in which 

 the author shows that the chief mass of the Schiefergebirge must, according to its 

 fossils, be con-elated not with the English Silurian, but with the Devonian. 



" The extent of the Devonian in the Rhenish Schiefergebirge, the accuracy of 

 the observations made upon it, the completeness and variety of the series, and its 

 richness in fossils," make it the most important area for this system. l< This moun- 

 tain region, which in general has the form of a plateau, stretches from the Eder 

 and Diemel to beyond the Meuse," and consists of " strongly compressed beds," 

 with a "system of reversed folds. . . . All these folds consist of Devonian 

 rocks, altogether probably at least 20,000 feet thick. 



" Within the Devonian rocks themselves no unconformity has yet been found, 

 and the whole succession seems to have been deposited without any important 

 check, and passes up without break into the overlying Culm." 



The errors made by Murchison and Sedgwick in the Rhenish area 

 were admitted by the former after seeing Roemer 's work above men- 

 tioned, and in his famous book "Siluria" (1854) he writes as follows: 



" The clear general views of that Nestor of geologists, D'Omalius d'Halloy, the 

 remarkable work and map of M Dumont, as well as the previous labors of Prussian 

 geologists, including the maps of Leopold von Buch, Hoffman, von Dechen, and 

 Oynhausen, unquestionably led the way in the succession of efforts, through which 

 our present knowledge has been obtained. After the publication of the above 

 works, Professor Sedgwick and myself endeavored to show (1839) that, like Devon- 

 shire and Cornwall, the Rhenish provinces contained a great mass of those strata, 

 intermediate between the Silurian and Carboniferous deposits, which we had called 

 Devonian ; the equivalent, in our belief, of the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland and 

 Herefordshire. Our contemporaries have admitted that, in our excursion of one 

 long summer in Germany, we succeeded in proving the existence of such an inter- 

 mediate series both in Prussia and Belgium, and also in showing how, on the, right 

 bank of the Rhine, the uppermost 'grauwacke' was divisible into Lower Carbonif- 

 erous and Upper Devonian rocks. Misled, however, by an erroneous interpretation 

 of some of the fossils (for at that time the Lower Devonian forms had been little 

 developed), we adopted the belief, that the inferior ' fossiliferous grauwacke,' or that 

 which has since been called the ' Spiriferen Sandstein' of the Rhine, was an equiv- 

 alent of the Upper Silurian. I have been convinced, through the paleontological 

 labors of Ferdinand Roemer and the brothers Sandberger, that the types of that 

 lower Rhenish subdivision are distinct from the Upper Silurian, and in harmony 

 with the lowest Devonian group of other countries. And for some years I have been 

 aware that, whilst our sections representing the succession of the mineral masses 

 were correct, the interpretation or synonymy to be attached to the lower division 

 was erroneous. . . . 



" It is, however, satisfactory to have ascertained in a recent visit to my old ground, 

 that all the knowledge acquired in the fourteen years which have elapsed since our 



