Similar breccias to those before described are found in the
more southern counties last mentioned, where their appearance is rendered more
striking by the marked contrast they present to the beds of well-rolled and
rounded pebbles of the Trias occupying a large area in the same region.
Professor Ramsay refers the angular form and large size of the fragments
composing these breccias to the action of floating ice in the sea. These masses
of angular rock, some of them weighing more than half a ton, and lying
confusedly in a red, unstratified marl, like stones in boulder-drift, are in
some cases polished, striated, and furrowed like erratic blocks in the moraine
of a glacier. They can be shown in some cases to have travelled from the parent
rocks, thirty or more miles distant, and yet not to have lost their angular
shape. (Ramsay Quarterly Geological Journal 1855; and Lyell Principles of
Geology volume 1 page 223 10th edition.)
PERMIAN ROCKS OF THE CONTINENT.
Germany is the classic ground of the Magnesian Limestone now called Permian. The
formation was well studied by the miners of that country a century ago as
containing a thin band of dark-coloured cupriferous shale, characterised at
Mansfield in Thuringia by numerous fossil fish.
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