VI.—On the Classification of the European Rocks Known as Permian and Trias

Abstract

Any geologist who has spent a short time at Eisenach, and has examined any of the numerous road- and hill-side sections in the district about the celebrated Wartburg, must have been struck, as I was myself several years ago, with the enormous development of the breccias and conglomerates interbedded with well-stratified sandstones and marls; and this district is fairly typical of the Thüringerwald. For an account of these the reader must be referred to Siluria, to the paper by Murchison and Morris before mentioned, and to Credner. The former writers remark: “The movements by which the great brecciated masses were aggregated were clearly suspended and repeated many times; the intervals of quiescence allowing of those deposits of finely, triturated red sand and marl which alternate with the coarse and subangular conglomerates. … These breccias and conglomerates, with their associated sandstones, are of gigantic dimensions, and have been bored into in fruitless searches after coal to a depth of about 2500 English feet.” (Here is surely something more than a mere appendage to the Carboniferous.)