1877J 
Notices of Books. 
253 
dissolved in water and precipitated and accumulated ; but why 
it was precisely at the Permian period that the main deposits of 
copper originated is a question unsolved by the theory of aqueous 
deposition. 
In the Brown jura iron ore was formerly worked on the 
Oberlegli Alp, in the Klonthal, and in the valleys of Gentel and 
Lauterbrunnen, and at Gonzen, where it occurs along with black 
manganese ore, carbonate of manganese, heavy spar, fluor-spar, 
and iron pyrites. Petroleum is found in the lias marls to a great 
extent, but more in the Swabian Alp than within the political 
boundaries of Switzerland. 
The carboniferous strata of Switzerland, limited as they are, 
bear witness to the very wide distribution of the plants of that 
epoch. The flora of the whole of Europe at that time was mir- 
rored in the little island which formed the Switzerland of the 
carboniferous period. Even of the 300 species of coal-plants 
which have been found in America, about half occur also in 
Europe. This remarkable fadl is not difficult of explanation if 
we consider that the flora of that epoch consisted chiefly of 
flowerless plants whose exceedingly minute spores would be 
easily swept away by the winds. Further, there was evidently 
a great uniformity of climate all over the globe, the chief 
amount of heat being due to the earth itself rather than that of 
the sun. The vegetable species in question would also encounter 
no opposition from social plants, such as grasses, which have 
since overspread so large a portion of the earth’s surface ; nor 
would they serve as food to animals — an exemption which their 
nearest allies enjoy to a very considerable extent even down to 
the present day. The carboniferous formation of Switzerland 
furnishes also the most ancient Swiss fossil animal with which 
we are acquainted — a species of cockroach ( Blatta Helvetica) 
nearly twice the size of the house-pest which has become natu- 
ralised throughout modern Europe. 
The saliferous formation of Switzerland contains deposits of 
rock salt from 30 to 60 feet in thickness, and evidently due to a 
dried-up sea, as proved by the numerous bivalve shells found — 
the muschelkalk or shelly limestone. During this period Swit- 
zerland was covered by a shallow sea inhabited by encrinites 
quite foreign to the present European fauna; molluscs, ap- 
proaching much more closely to those of our modern seas, and 
some of them even belonging to living genera. In Aargau 
Mosch has enumerated 57 of these species. Nautili, which now 
exist only in the Indian Seas, made their appearance in the car- 
boniferous rocks long before the true ammonites. Fishes and 
reptiles inhabited the sea of the Triassic or Saliferous period. 
Remains of the Ichthyosaurus and N othosaurus have been dis- 
covered by Mosch at Schwaderloch. The Keuper, or uppermost 
member of the Trias, is largely developed in the canton of Basel, 
where our author has obtained 25 species of fossil land-plants. 
