412 PALEOZOIC TIME. 



2. DISTURBANCES IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES. 



The disturbances through the course of the Palaeozoic ages in 

 Europe appear to have been more numerous and diversified than 

 in America. But they were inferior in extent to those that 

 attended its close. Murchison remarks that the close of the Car- 

 boniferous period was specially marked by disturbances and up- 

 liftings. He states that it was then " that the Coal strata and 

 their antecedent formations were very generally broken up and 

 thrown, by grand upheavals, into separate basins, which were frac- 

 tured by numberless powerful dislocations." In the north of 

 England, as first shown by Sedgwick, and also near Bristol, and in 

 the southeastern part of the Coal measures of South Wales, there 

 is distinct unconformability between the Carboniferous and lowest 

 Permian. Elie de Beaumont has named this system of dislocations 

 the System of the North of England. Between Derby and the frontier 

 of Scotland the mountain-axis is of this date, and trends between 

 north and north-northwest ; the region is remarkable for its im- 

 mense faults. The great dislocations of North Wales may be of the 

 same epoch. 



Yet, while it is manifest that the period between the close of the 

 Carboniferous and the Trias was one of enormous disturbances, it 

 is not always clear to what time in this interval particular uplifts 

 should be referred. In the Dudley coal field, the Permian beds, 

 according to Murchison, are conformable to the Carboniferous ; 

 but at the close of the Permian (or at least before the middle 

 of the Trias) there were great dislocations. In other coal regions, 

 as those of France and Belgium, and of Bohemia about Prague, 

 there is other evidence of physical changes in the absence of Per- 

 mian beds, while also, in many places, the beds of these coal 

 regions are much contorted. De Beaumont's System of the Nether- 

 lands includes dislocations of Permian beds along the foot of the 

 Hartz Mountains, and in Nassau and Saxony, which preceded 

 the deposition of the Triassic. He distinguishes examples of this 

 system of disturbances in France and some other parts of Europe, 

 and also prominently in South Wales. To his System of the Rhine 

 he refers dislocations and elevations of the Permian sandstone of 

 the Vosges (gres de Vosges) along the mountains of the Vosges, 

 the Black Forest, and the Odenwald, and shows that they antedate 

 the Triassic period. 



In Eussia, as well as England, there are tracts where the Per- 

 mian strata follow on after the Carboniferous without unconforma- 

 bility. It was in this closing part of the Palaeozoic era, either 



