The Tri Weekly Standard

Important Geological Discovery.-At the annual meeting of the Swedish Academy of Science, M. Nordenskiold announced that a discovery of great importance to geological science had been made in the hill of Nullaberg, in Sweden. A large deposit of bituminous gneiss, thirty-three metres in thickness, has been found imbedded in layers of gneiss and mica schist. It is composed, in addition to feldspar, quartz and mica, of a black substance like coal, containing carbonated hydrogen-in fact, a real organic substance, formed of the remains of plants or animals coeval with the deposit. He added that there could be no doubt as to the antiquity and geological situation of the strata of Nullaberg; infiltration was impossible. The inference was that the crystalline stratified rocks of Scandinavia were formed when there existed animated creatures, but at a time long anterior to the period when life is supposed to have first existed on the earth.