8 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
areas in Shropshire and Staffordshire it is one great red arenaceous 
series, with a few subordinate courses of calcareous conglomerate, 
rollowing it to the north, Mr. Binnej has demonstrated that the 
fossils of the Zechstein show themselves in the heart of red marls 
which occupy on the whole a superior part of such a red series ; and 
in tracing these rocks northwards he has demonstrated that there 
are, besides, two great underlying masses, first of couglomerates and 
breccias, and next of soft red sandstones, the latter attaining, as he 
believes, a thickness of not less than 2000 feet. Here then the Per- 
mian may be considered a Trias. Professor Harkness, in a memoir he 
is preparing, estimates the thickness of these Lower Sandstones and 
conglomerates to the N.E. of West Ormside, in Cumberland, at 4000 
to 5000 feet, and shows that they are surmounted by marl-slates 
bearing plants, thin-bedded red sandstone, grey shale, and sandstone 
and limestone, the latter — ^ the representative of the Magnesian 
Limestone — being covered by red argillaceous shale.* IS'ow in all 
these cases the Permian is a series divisible into three or more parts. 
But when we follow the same group into Scotland, it there parts with 
its calcareous feature, and, becomiDg one red sandstone of vast thick- 
ness, is again a Monas. 
I have entered into this explanation because my friend Dr. Gei- 
nitz has seized upon one illustration in my work ' Siluria ' which 
shows that in certain tracts, where the Zechstein or Magnesian 
Limestone is subordinate to an enveloping series of sandstones, the 
Permian of my classification is there as much a tripartite Palaeozoic 
group as the Trias of Central Grermany is a triple formation of Meso- 
zoic age. Unless, therefore, the data to which my associates and 
self have appealed, in the work on ' Russia and the tJral Mountains,' 
and which I have further developed in Memoirs read before the 
Geological Society, and in my two editions of ' Siluria,' be shown to 
be inaccurate, I hold to the opinion that there are tracts in which 
the Zechstein is simply a fossiliferous zone in a great sandstone 
series, to which no division by numerals can be logically applied. 
Even if I do not appeal to the natural evidences in England, Eussia, 
and parts of Germany, but refer to those tracts where the Zechstein 
or Magnesian Limestone has no natural red cover, I may well ask, 
does not the word " Permian," in the sense in which it was origi- 
nally adopted, serve for every tract wherein the uppermost palaeo- 
zoic fossil animals and plants are found, whether the strata of which 
the group is composed form, as in Eussia and Silesia, one great series 
of alternations of plant-bearing sandstones and marls in parts con- 
taining bands of fossiliferous limestone, or whether, as in other 
tracts, the Zechstein stands alone (as near Saalfeld), or in others, 
again, where the group is tripartite, and even quadripartite ? Quite 
* The red clay or argillaceous shale which covers the limestone is surmounted 
at Hilton, in Cxmiberland, by five himdred feet of red sandstone, which, though 
perfectly conformable to the subjacent Permian rocks, he considers to belong to the 
Bmiter Sandstein of the Trias. Here, then, as in Grermany, the limestone may 
have a red cover, and yet the Bimter Sandstein be intact. 
