326 
SILURIA. 
[Chap. XIII. 
is worked is a grey conglomerate, made up of fragments of granite, quartz, and 
older rocks, including even those of the Upper Coal-strata, over the surface of 
which the deposit ranges transgressively. Schistose in aspect, and becoming 
reddish in parts only, this bottom Permian rock, which obtained its light colour 
from the breaking up of the whitish Upper Carboniferous Sandstone, contains 
indeed a few layers of Coal formed out of true Permian Plants, including the re- 
markable genus of Palm, Guglielmites Permianus (so named by Geinitz on account 
of its resemblance to the Guglielma speciosa of the Brazils described by Martius). 
With this Plant are associated Calamites gigas, Brongn., Walchia filiciformis, 
Sternberg, many Psaronites, and the great Araucarites Saxonicus, some of the 
silicified stems of which, ornamenting the above-mentioned splendid and instruc- 
tive museum, have a diameter of 3 feet. Passing up through this lower zone, 
which has a thickness, in one shaft in the Plauensche Grund near Dresden, of 
about 320 feet, we come to the chief mass of the Roth-liegende, in this district 
between 500 and 600 feet thick, and perfectly conformable to the underlying grey 
rock. This mass is made up of the debris of all the more ancient rocks of the 
neighbourhood, including much lydian-stone, granite or granatite, gneiss, grey- 
wacke, and porphyry, some of the fragments being in fact gigantic, as seen near 
Tharande. This rock is also associated with bands of porphyry, which Geinitz, 
considering it to have been contemporaneously deposited with the conglomerates 
in the form of lava, has termed ' Schlamm-Lava.' This, though truly an igneous 
rock, is as regularly bedded and jointed as the red strata with which it alternates. 
In the same tract, indeed, as in many other parts of Central Germany, the dejec- 
tions of porphyry and amygdaloid have been occasionally so mixed up with sand 
and pebbles of the then existing sea, as to render it difficult to decide whether 
the stratum should be referred to an aqueous or to an igneous origin. 
Calcareous matter is here and there sparingly distributed j and a coprolite has 
been detected and described by Geinitz. A limestone band, occurring at 
Schereindorf in the Plauensche Grund, and lying between the upper and lower 
or grey member of the Roth-liegende, contains a few indistinct Bivalves and 
Fishes. 
Of the numerous fossil Plants of these Permian deposits in the environs of 
Dresden, and thence extending over the adjacent tracts of Saxony and Bohemia, 
it is sufficient to state for the present that four or five species only are also 
known in the subjacent Coal-strata, thus completely sustaining the conclusions 
drawn by Geinitz and Gutbier * as to the independence of the Permian flora, — an 
inference which, as will presently be shown, has recently been amply confirmed 
by Goppert. 
In taking a general view of the Permian rocks of Germany, we see that 
they differ chiefly from those of Russia, in their lithological divisions, by 
exhibiting a much more massive development of the lower member, or the 
Roth-liegende, over large areas, and in not having yet offered in their su- 
perior member, or the red beds above the Zechstein, those numerous Plants 
and Saurians which characterize the Upper Permian sandstone and con- 
glomerates of Russia. On the other hand, by detecting in Germany many 
of the Plants in the red rocks below the Zechstein which in Russia lie in 
* See ' Versteinerungen des Permischen Sys- mian age, and several are identical with forms 
temes in Sachsen,' Dresden and Leipzig, 1849. from Eussia, which there lie in strata above the 
Out of sixty species of these Permian plants from Zechstein. 
Zwickau in Saxony, forty are exclusively of Per- 
