Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/18

4 That something like this has taken place seems indicated by the film-like character of such specimens of wood as those we have referred to, in which cases the sulphuret of iron was probably deposited in the fine parting between the wood and the bark. Moreover, the casts of the teredo-holes are covered over with the same film of red oxide of iron, which has resulted from the decomposition at a subsequent period of the sulphuret.

Although we attempt not then to determine their family or genera, we are not doing bad service to science in drawing attention to these fossil cretaceous fruits. The very knowledge of their existence will stimulate other observers to seek for more illustrative examples. What one is defective in, another may possess, and so from one to the other we may gain a general knowledge of the whole organism long before any perfect specimen has been brought to light.

In the present case we submit our plates and figures of these fruits, and leave the honour of naming them open to him who can really tell us What they are. 

In the year 1859, M. Marcou proposed to substitute the word "Dyas" for "Permian," and summed up his views by saying that he regarded "the New Red Sandstone, comprising the Dyas and Trias, as a great geologic period, equal in time and space to the Palæozoic epoch or the Greywacke (Silurian and Devonian), the Carboniferous (Mountain-limestone and Coal), the Mesozoic (Jurassic and Cretaceous), the Tertiary (Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene), and the recent deposits (Quaternary and later)"!!

As that author, who had not been in Russia, criticized the labours and inductions of my associates De Verneuil and Von Keyserling, and myself, in having proposed the word "Permian" for tracts in which he surmised that we had commingled with our Permian deposits much red rock of the age of the Trias, I briefly defended the views