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Azores. Lower Miocene Volcanic Rocks. Isle of Mull. Staffa and Antrim. The Eifel. Upper and Lower Miocene Volcanic Rocks of Auvergne. Hill of Gergovia. Eocene Volcanic Rocks of Monte Bolca. Trap of Cretaceous Period. Oolitic Period. Triassic Period. Permian Period. Carboniferous Period. Erect Trees buried in Volcanic Ash in the Island of Arran. Old Red Sandstone Period. Silurian Period.
In one of the sections described by M. Studer in the highest of the Bernese Alps, namely in the Roththal, a valley bordering the line of perpetual snow on the northern side of the Jungfrau, there occurs a mass of gneiss 1000 feet thick, and 15,000 feet long, which I examined, not only resting upon, but also again covered by strata containing oolitic fossils.
Further inland the country was crusted on the surface with an oolitic limestone, and for the most part covered by brush; a few open plains being interspersed here and there among the scrubs, as is generally the case in that description of country. The natives still appeared to be in our neighbourhood, but none had been near us since they first left on the 19th.
By his own observations and those of M. Lory he has proved that the area of the Alps was rising and emerging from beneath the ocean towards the close of the Oolitic epoch, and was above water at the commencement of the Cretaceous era; while, on the other hand, the area of the Jura, about 100 miles to the north, was slowly sinking at the close of the Oolitic period, and had become submerged at the commencement of the Cretaceous.
But the researches of MM. Savi, Boue, Pareto, Guidoni, De la Beche, Hoffman, and Pilla demonstrated that this marble, once supposed to be formed before the existence of organic beings, is, in fact, an altered limestone of the Oolitic period, and the underlying crystalline schists are secondary sandstones and shales, modified by Plutonic action.
Hence in following thus far the geological history of the Cordillera, it may be inferred that the bed of a deep and open, or nearly open, ocean was filled up by porphyritic eruptions, aided probably by some general and some local elevations, to that comparatively shallow level at which the cretaceo- oolitic shells first lived.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
In that case the date of their origin would have been thrown back to an era antecedent to the deposition of the Lower Silurian or Cambrian strata, although in reality they were formed in the Oolitic period, and altered at some subsequent and perhaps much later epoch.
The largest of these two was one yard and a half wide and a foot deep, and appeared of a permanent character. We now ascended an undulating and rather more elevated tract of country of an oolitic limestone formation, most luxuriantly clothed with the richest grass, and having several lakes interspersed among the hollows between the ridges.
Not long ago, palaeontologists maintained that the whole class of birds came suddenly into existence during the eocene period; but now we know, on the authority of Professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper greensand; and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archeopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solenhofen.