96 
ISLAND LIFE. 
[part I. 
field slate, with plants, insects, and marsupials ; and the Oolitic 
coal of Yorkshire and Sutherlandshire. Beds of the same age 
occur in the Rocky 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 ! 1 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 
1 Introduction and Succession of Vertebrate Life in America , by Professor 
0. C. Marsh. Reprinted from the Popular Science Monthly , March, April. 
1878 . 
