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We have every reason to conclude that the gaps which occur, both between the larger and smaller sections of the English Oolites, imply intervals of time, elsewhere represented by fossiliferous strata, although no deposit may have taken place in the British area. This conclusion is warranted by the partial extent of many of the minor and some of the larger divisions even in England.
Rich lowlands and oolites suit the cereals; red marl produces wonderful grazing grass; bare uplands are best for gorse and heather. Hence everything favours for the practical man the mistaken idea that plants and trees grow mainly out of the soil.
All the rocks are sloping eastward, the way we are going; and each new rock or soil we come to lies on the top of the one before it. Now we shall run down hill for many a mile, down the back of the oolites, past pretty Chippenham, and Wootton-Bassett, towards Swindon spire. Look at the country, child; and thank God for this fair English land, in which your lot is cast.
Among these, are different species of oolites marble, some shell marbles, and some composed of a chalky substance, or of undistinguishable parts. But it appears, that all these different marbles had been consolidated or made hard, then broken into fragments, rolled and worn by attrition, and thus collected together, along with some sand or small siliceous bodies, into one mass.
Species of the order are found in Mexico, South Africa, Australia, and India, some inhabiting the hottest and dampest, and others the driest climates on the surface of the globe; and it appears to me rash to argue much from the presence of the order in the coal of Yorkshire and India, when we reflect that the geologist of some future epoch may find as good reasons for referring the present Cape, Australian, or Mexican Flora to the same period as that of the Lias and Oolites, when the Cycadeae now living in the former countries shall be fossilised.
First, there is no distinction to be made of what is termed primary and secondary mountains, with regard to the position of their strata; every different species of stratum, from the stratified granite and quartzy schistus of the Alps to the oolites of the Jura and Saleve, being found in every respect the same; whether this shall be supposed as arising from their original formation, or, according to the present theory, from a subsequent deplacement of strata formed originally in a horizontal situation.
These beds, which are without any marine equivalent in this country, appear completely to bridge over the interval between the Neocomian and the Oolites. They may, perhaps, as suggested by Mr. Judd, be of the same age as part of the Wealden series. Gervillia anceps, Desh. Trigonia caudata, Agassiz. Terebratula sella, Sowerby. Diceras Lonsdalii. Upper Neocomian, Wilts. a. The bivalve shell. b.
We have got off the oolites on to what is called the Oxford clay; and then, I believe, on to the Coral rag, and on that again lies what we are coming to now. Do you see the red sand in that field? Then that is the lowest layer of a fresh world, so to speak; a world still younger than the oolites the chalk world. But that is not chalk, or anything like it. No, that is what is called Greensand.
Geologically speaking, the Carboniferous formation occurs near the close of that group of systems which have been classed as "palaeozoic," younger in point of age than the well known Devonian and Old Red Sandstone strata, but older by far than the Oolites, the Wealden, or the Cretaceous strata.
The external outline of the country which the geologist observes in travelling eastward from Paris to Metz, is precisely analogous, and is caused by a similar succession of rocks intervening between the tertiary strata and the Lias; with this difference, however, that the escarpments of Chalk, Upper, Middle, and Lower Oolites face towards the east instead of the west.
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