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Updated: June 3, 2025
The New Red Sandstone System is subdivided into groups, some of which are wanting in some places; they are pretty fully developed in the north of England, in the following ascending order: 1. Lower red sandstone; 2. Magnesian limestone; 3. Red and white sandstones and conglomerate; 4. Variegated marls.
The chalk-beds are the highest which extend over a considerable space; but in hollows of these beds, comparatively limited in extent, there have been formed series of strata clays, limestones, marls, alternating to which the name of the Tertiary Formation has been applied.
Near Clermont, in Argonne, a few leagues from St. Menehould, where these indurated marls crop out from beneath the Gault, I have seen them, on decomposing, leave the surface of every ploughed field literally strewed over with this fossil oyster. The real nature of the shell, of which there are many species in oolitic rocks, is still a matter of conjecture.
"A group of red marl and red sandstone, containing salt and gypsum, being interposed in England between the Lias and the Coal, all other red marls and sandstones, associated some of them with salt, and others with gypsum, and occurring not only in different parts of Europe, but in North America, Peru, India, the salt deserts of Asia, those of Africa in a word, in every quarter of the globe, were referred to one and the same period.... It was in vain to urge as an objection the improbability of the hypothesis which implies that all the moving waters on the globe were once simultaneously charged with sediment of a red colour.
Amidst the first strata I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling, crystallized masses; and by the time I had got him into the tertiary period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht and the conchiferous marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. Kitty, my dear, it is no laughing matter!
But wherever there was a lava vent it was filled with molten matter, which on cooling was harder than the sandstones and marls through which it penetrated. The chimney to the region of fire below was thus filled with a black rock which yielded more slowly to the disintegrating agencies of weather, and so black rocks rise up from mesas on every hand.
The arenaceous division, the marls, and the limestone may all be seen in some places to alternate with each other; yet it can by no means be affirmed that there is no order of arrangement.
We find lacustrine marls on the sides of the Esquiline Hill where it slopes down into the Forum, and fresh-water bivalve and univalve shells in the ground under the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol; while on the face of the Aventine Hill, overhanging the Tiber at a height of ninety feet, is a cliff of travertine, which is half a mile long.
At the east end there are a number of small, boiling quagmires, which, on forcing a stick into the matted ground, send forth water and steam. In some deep spots further west, grey, white, red, and yellow clays have been deposited in small beds over each other, giving them the appearance of variegated marls.
A large part of the Upper Miocene insects and plants alluded to have been met with at Oeningen, near the Lake of Constance, in two or three spots embedded in thinly laminated marls, the entire thickness of which scarcely exceeds 3 or 4 feet, and in two quarries of very limited dimensions.
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