# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

72 The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation.

-mary rock formations, but rather in not a few places granite, gneiss, mica, and other rocks of these formations are also found lying over the greywacke, indeed over Jura limestone and chalk formations (that is, the primary rock lying over the transitional and Flötz mountains). Accordingly one distinguishes older and younger granite, gneiss, and crystalline schist formations for no other reason than that one determines the age of their origin from the sequence of the layers and strata lying one above another — for in their mineral composition one has been able to discern no difference between the supposedly older and younger formations. *)"

3. "Furthermore, the various main formations and their individual members often pass into one another so imperceptibly that they cannot be marked off and distinguished from one another. The transitional mountain range takes this name from the fact that it cannot be sharply separated either from the primary rock or from the Flötz mountains, but is rather connected to the one as to the other through transitions. ""There are, after all, no true species among the kinds of mountains, such as occur in oryctognosy, and for that very reason the mountain groups cannot be sharply separated from one another"" (Wagner I, p. 369). The tertiary formations show, on the one hand, with regard to their material, ""no difference from the earlier formations; only the more local sea and shore formations show a greater softness and looseness of the masses. Yet limestones, sandstones, shales, and the like also occur, which externally cannot be distinguished at all from older rocks of the same kind"" (Pfaff, p. 572, cf. Naumann II, p. 1026). On the other hand, they can be marked off so little from the diluvial and alluvial, or quaternary, formations that — as Naumann says, II, p. 1153 — it ""will often depend on the judgment of the individual observer, or on the agreement of several observers, whether a given deposit is to be declared quaternary, or still tertiary, or already a so-called recent formation."" In very many cases, therefore, the formations are distinguished only by the difference of their fossil organisms."

4. "Finally, the mountain formations distinguished by the system by no means surround the globe everywhere, but rather occur only locally, so that it is only in

*) Further evidence of such ""deposits of gneiss, mica schist, and other stratified silicate rocks, which are found overlaid, either upon undoubted sedimentary formations or upon the primary schist formation, under such conditions that their positional relationship can be explained neither by overthrusts nor by other dislocations, while at the same time no sufficient evidence for their metamorphic or eruptive nature can be found,"" is given by Naumann, II, pp. 169–175. He does indeed also count these among the more recent formations, but describes them as ""a wholly puzzling phenomenon, as a cryptogenic formation,"" that is, one ""whose origin cannot yet be sufficiently explained,"" and further remarks that they are by no means among the great rarities, but sometimes attain a quite considerable extent.