74 The Lower Devonian Deposits of Maryland 



for this system. " This mountain 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 prob- 

 ably 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." 



After seeing the work of Roemer above mentioned, Murchison admitted 

 the errors made by Sedgwick and himself in the Ehenish area, and in his 

 famous book Siluria (1854) he writes as follows : 



" The clear general views of that Xestor 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, Hoifman, von Dechen, and Oynhausen, unquestionably led the way 

 in the succession of eiforts, 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 Devonshire and Corn- 

 wall, the Rhenish provinces contained a great mass of those strata, inter- 

 mediate 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 intermediate 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 Carboniferous 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 de- 

 veloped), we adopted the belief, that the inferior ' fossiliferous grau- 

 wacke,' or that which has since been called the ' Spirifer Sandstein ' of 

 the Rhine, was an equivalent of the Upper Silurian. I have been con- 

 vinced, through the palgeontological 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 De- 



