ON GEOLOGY. 



63 



appearance. They are supposed to exist over the globe generally, and 

 to be independent of chorographic or topographic changes, and have hence 

 been still further denominated universal formations. 



M. Werner has since, however, been induced to add to these a sixth 

 class, consisting of what he has called partial or local formations : 

 comprising those which are so often found in vast hollows or basins of par- 

 ticular countries ; the materials of which are, in many instances, strangely 

 intermixed, and have probably been carried down into such basins by 

 circumscribed deluges, produced by an exundation of rivers or seas, oc- 

 casionally alternating with each other, or by other partial disruptions. We 

 have here, therefore, reason to expect, — what in fact is perpetually met 

 with, — a motley combination of whatever substances may have existed in 

 the course of such seas or rivers or rifted soils, with masses or fragments of 

 most of the universal formations, alternate beds of marine and fresh- 

 water alluvions, and, consequently, animal and vegetable remains of all 

 kinds. 



The composite rocks that fill up the great basin around Paris, in which 

 the skeletons of so many unknown animals, even quadrupeds of the hugest 

 size, elephants, hippopotami, tapirs, mammoths, and other pachydermatous, 

 or thick-skinned monsters, have been discovered, are of this local forma- 

 tion. The celebrated quarries of iEningen, on the Rhine, are of a like 

 kind ; and these, having been erroneously regarded of the same antiquity 

 as Werner's universal formations, have been appealed to by various 

 writers as affording proofs of the falsity of his theory.* 



We have other instances of this local formation in many parts of our 

 own country, and particularly near the banks of the Thames. Mr. Trim- 

 mer has given an interesting account of the substrate of two fields in the 

 vicinity of Brentford, that are loaded with the organic remains of the larger 

 kinds of quadrupeds ; as bones of elephants, approaching to both the 

 Asiatic and the African species ; horns of deer, apparently as enormous 

 as those dug up in Ireland ; bones of the bos genus ; and teeth and bones 

 of the hippopotamus ; the last very abundant, and intermixed with fresh 

 water shells, t and other fresh-water rehcs. 



Occasionally, however, marine remains are found intermingled with 

 such animal fossils, and composing their beds instead of those of fresh- 

 water ; and not unfrequently layers of the one kind, as in the basin of 

 Paris, are irregularly surmounted by layers of the other. But no human 

 skeletons are discovered in the midst of any of these rocks, although the 

 ' bones of man are as capable of preservation as those of any other animal : 

 the only known instance of this sort being that imported into our own 

 country from Guadaloupe by Sir Alexander Cochrane, and which is now 

 exhibited in the British Museum, imbedded in a block of calcareous stone ; 

 a very accurate description of which has been published in the Philosophi - 

 cal Transactions by Mr. Konig. 



It is hence obvious, that the catastrophes which involved these enormous 

 quadrupeds in destruction must have occurred at a period when mankind 

 had no existence in the regions which were thus overwhelmed ; and in some 

 places overwhelmed alternately by disruptions and inundations of sea and of 

 fresh water. And it is equally obvious, that as the fossil bones are not 



* For an admirable defence of this part of the theory, see Mr. Jameson's essay ** Oji 

 Formations," inserted in the Annals of Philos. no. iii. p. 191. 



t Piiil. Trans, for 1813, p. 133. See also Mr. Webster's valuable essav on the same subject, 

 ju vol. li, of the Transaction? of the Geological Societv. 



