162 EEV. A. IKTIK^G- ON" THE RED-EOCK 



Tvhole Eed Eock series of Devon in the Triassic System were not 

 altogether unpereeived by him ; and I have little doubt that on 

 further consideration he will be led to suspect, as Sir A. Eamsay 

 was inclined to do (Joe. cit. p. 394), that the Lower Breccia-series 

 may be of Permian age. We certainly are " at a loss to account 

 for them," qua members of the Trias, as Mr. Ussher saw, from 

 their absence in the Somerset area, and, as he has shown in a 

 subsequent paper (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxxv. pp. 245 et 

 seq.), in JN^ormandy, where the marginal conditions of the Triassic 

 basin proper of the south-west seem to be recorded. 



As the Thliringen conglomerates are the land- and shore-deposits 

 accumulated from the degradation-products of the adjacent palaeozoic 

 land ; as the great Permian breccias of the west of England are 

 related to the older land further to the west ; as (to my mind at 

 least) the so-called basement-beds of the Carboniferous series of 

 JS'orthumberland are but the still older local degradation-products of 

 the old Cheviot mountain-island ; and as, lastly, the great conglo- 

 meratic Xagelfluh of the northern Alps (e. g. of the Eigi) shows the 

 clearest evidence of direct derivation, by subaerial waste and the 

 transporting-agency of mountain streams, from the highlands ex- 

 posed by the great elevation which followed the period of the 

 Nummulitic Limestone, the terrestrial conditions under which they 

 were accumulated being shown (in some cases) hy the inclusion in 

 them of seams of coal ; so, it appears, in the Devon area a record 

 of similar physical conditions may be recognized as marking the 

 Post-Carboniferous period, with which the palaeozoic history of the 

 globe terminated. 



Then as to the deep-red marls, which in this paper are assigned 

 to the Permian, these bear a relation to the breccia-series remarkably 

 similar in some respects to that which the Loss bears to the older 

 and coarser detritus of the valleys of the Danube, the Ehine, and 

 other rivers of Central Europe. Eecent investigations by Dr. Jentsch 

 and other observers quoted by von Hauer, in his masterly work ' Die 

 Geologic' (pp. 706-707), have led to the rejection of Eichthofen's 

 theory as to the aeolian origin of the European Loss, -without denying 

 its application to that of Central Asia. The marls, with which we 

 are here concerned, are not supposed to be a Permian normal Loss, 

 They agree with it petrographically in the extreme fineness of their 

 material (a grain of | millim. m diameter having never been found 

 in the true Loss), in their homogeneity, and in the general want of 

 definite stratification; but they differ from it in the large proportion 

 of argillaceous material they contain, the Loss being essentially an 

 extremely fine sand. But on the lower slopes of the Carpathians, 

 contiguous to the trachytic regions of these mountains, there is a 

 lower member of the Loss, known to the Austrian geologists under 

 the vernacular name of " ^jarok," a " for the most part reddish, 

 tough, plastic clay, which contains no trace of organic remains, and 

 is always found at higher elevations on the mountain-slopes than 

 the true Loss." This is considered by Szabo, who has most fully 



