the present, only a local significance,--being derived, like so many of the geological names, from the places where the investigations of the phenomena were first undertaken,--but in course of time will, no doubt, apply to all the contemporaneous upheavals, wherever they may be traced, just as we now have Silurian, Devonian, Permian, and Jurassic deposits in America as well as in Europe. The Silurian and Devonian epochs seem to have been instrumental rather in enlarging the tracts of land already raised than in adding new ones; yet to these two epochs is traced the upheaval of a large and important island to the northeast of France. We may call it the Belgian island, since it covered the ground of modern Belgium; but it also extended considerably beyond these limits, and included much of the Northern Rhine region. A portion only of this tract, to which belongs the central mass of the Vosges and the Black Forest, was lifted during the Silurian epoch,--which also enlarged considerably Wales and Scotland, the Bohemian island, the island of Bretagne, and Scandinavia. During this epoch the sheet of water between Norway and Sweden became dry land; a considerable tract was added to their northern extremity on the Arctic shore; while a broad band of Silurian deposits, lying now between Finland and Russia, enlarged that region. The Silurian epoch has been referred by Elie de Beaumont to the system of upheaval called by him the system of Westmoreland and Hundsrueck,--again merely in reference to the spots at which these upheavals were first studied, the centres, as it were, from which the investigations spread. But in their geological significance they indicate all the oscillations and disturbances of the soil throughout the region over which the Silurian deposits have been traced in Europe. The Devonian epoch added greatly to the outlines of the Belgian island. To it belongs the region of the Ardennes, lying between France and Belgium, the Eifelgebirge, and a new disturbance of the Vosges, by which that region was also extended. The island of Bretagne was greatly increased by the Devonian deposits, and Bohemia also gained in dimensions, while the central plateau of France remained much the same as before. The changes of the Devonian epoch are traced by Elie de Beaumont to a system of upheavals called the Ballons of the Vosges and of Normandy,--so called from the rounded, balloon-like domes characteristic of the mountains of that time. To the Carboniferous epoch belong the mountain-systems of Forey, (to the west of Lyons,) of the North of England, and of the Netherlands. These three systems of upheaval have also been traced by Elie de Beaumont; and in the depressions formed between their elevations we find the coal-basins of Central France, of England, and of Germany. During all these epochs, in Europe as in America, every such dislocation of the surface was attended by a change in the animal creation.