XLVIII. The Subdivisions of the Carboniferous Series in Great Britain and some of their European Equivalents

Abstract

It is a well recognised fact ‶that the sequence of the Carboniferous series of beds, as found in Scotland, differs essentially from that which obtains in central England,″ and the correlation of the two groups has been attended with difficulty, mainly due, as I have pointed out in the Geological Magazine for April and May 1897, to a misconception of the succession of carboniferous rocks in Yorkshire, and to the fact that Professor Phillips established a purely local succession as typical of the carboniferous sequence in central England. The main evil which has resulted from this classification, is that in other districts where the succession is totally different, an altogether artificial and arbitrary set of divisions has been made, which can neither be followed in the field nor identified by palaeontological evidence, so as to bring it into line with the so-called typical section. Several systems have been proposed for the classification of the carboniferous rocks, all more or less based on lithological characters, for, up to the present, little or nothing has been accomplished in establishing life zones for the carboniferous rocks of Great Britain; but the great mistake in all of them is the establishment of the millstone grit and Yoredale series as essential subdivisions, and the attempt to make artificial equivalents for them in Scotland and Ireland, where the succession of rocks is often entirely different from that which obtains in central England. Would the terms millstone grit and Yoredale series ever have arisen if the carboniferous