96 



ISLAND LIFE. 



[part I. 



field slate, with plants, insects, and marsupials ; and the Oolitic 

 coal of Yorkshire and Siitherlandshire. Beds of the same age 

 occur in the Eocky Mountains of North America, containing 

 abundance of Dinosaurians and other reptiles, among which is 

 the Atlantosaurus, the largest land-animal ever known to have 

 existed. Professor 0. C. Marsh describes it as having been 

 between fifty and sixty feet long, and when standing erect at 

 least thirty feet high ! ^ Such monsters could hardly have been 

 developed except in an extensive land area. A small mammal, 

 Dryolestes, has been discovered in the same deposits. A rich 

 Jurassic flora has also been found in East Siberia and the 

 Amur valley. The older Triassic deposits are very extensively 

 developed in America, and both in the Connecticut valley and 

 the Rocky Mountains show tracks or remains of land reptiles, 

 amphibians and mammalia, while coalfields of the same age in 

 Virginia and Carolina produce abundance of plants. Here too 

 are found the ancient mammal, Microlestes, of Wurtemberg, with 

 the ferns, conifers, and Labyrinthodonts of the Bunter Sand- 

 stone in Germany ; while the beds of rock-salt in this forma- 

 tion, both in England and in many parts of the continent, 

 could only have been formed in inland seas or lakes, and thus 

 equally demonstrate continental conditions. 



We now pass into the oldest or Palaeozoic formations, but 

 find no diminution in the proofs of continental conditions. The 

 Permian formation has a rich flora often producing coal in 

 England, France, Saxony, Thuringia, Silesia, and Eastern Russia. 

 Coalfields of the same age occur in Ohio in North America. 

 In the still more ancient Carboniferous formation we find the 

 most remarkable proofs of the existence of our present continents 

 at that remote epoch, in the wonderful extension of coal beds in 

 all the known continents. We find them in Ireland, England, 

 and Scotland; in France, Spain, Belgium, Saxony, Prussia, 

 Bohemia, Hungary, Sweden, Spitzbergen, Siberia, Russia, 

 Greece, Turkey, and Persia; in many parts of continental 

 India, extensively in China, and in Australia, Tasmania and 



^ Introduction and Succession of Vertebrate Life in America^ by Professor 

 0. C. Marsh. Reprinted from the Popular Science Monthly^ March, April, 

 .1878, 



