56 Transactiorm of the Society. 



he should have made a more extended study of the accompanying 

 Mollusca.^ 



According to d'Orbigny no Foraminifera had been recorded of 

 earlier geological age than the Upper Lias, with the exception 

 of Fusulina cijlindricM. Fischer, from the Carboniferous ; ^ a glance 

 at Chapman's excellent Bibliography ^ marks the progress, or 

 rather the retrogression, of knowledge on this subject. Chapman 

 dealt with the matter at some length in a previous paper,* and 

 more recently Earland and I have dealt with it in our paper 

 " On the Foraminifera as World-Builders." ^ Out of many 

 instances we may note that d'Orbigny says in this Memoir that 

 no Miliolidas have appeared in the Upper Chalk, and that Ver- 

 neuilina, Gaudryina and many others " appear and disappear " 

 with the Cretaceous. His summary of geological distribution is 

 not uninteresting : he gives us the following distribution : 

 Carboniferous 1 species, Jurassic 20, Cretaceous 280, Tertiary 450, 

 Eecent 1000. His table of distribution of the latter is no less 

 didactic and empirical ; he gives us : Warm water regions 575, 

 temperate 350, cold 75.'^ 



As in the Cuba Memoir and elsewhere, d'Orbigny reviews the 

 work of previous authors and awards the palm, not without some 

 reason, to Fichtel and Moll, whose work he pronounces as far 

 superior to much that was then lieing published on the Fora- 

 minifera.^ This hits at the contemporary work of Ehrenberg, 

 Eeuss, Eoemer, Geinitz, Neugeboren, and others. Indeed, in a 

 note (on p. xxxi) he stigmatizes the work of Ehrenberg as practi- 

 cally useless (acfain with reason), on the ground that he determined 

 his species by transmitted light, saying justly that " it is only by 

 reflected light {opacite) that one can arrive at a true comprehension 

 of the forms, and the exterior details of the genera and species." 

 At the same time he deplores the unsatisfactory and incomplete 

 figures of Geinitz, Eoemer, and Eeuss, from which, as he justly 

 observed, it is impossible to recognize species of which one 

 possesses examples.^ Fichtel and Moll worked upon material 



' Eduard Suess, in his Memoir, " Untersuchungen ueber den Charakter der 

 oesterreichische Tertiarablagerungen " (1866), gave a clear exposition of this some- 

 wha"t complicated area, from which it would appear that the Eocene is overlaid 

 by marls and shales, and are followed in the Vienna Basin by the lowest Miocene, 

 above which is the Marine series— the "Tegel" of d'Orbigny, which is highly 

 fossiliferous, and from which it is fairly certain that the majority of the Vienna 

 Foraminifera were derived. See also XXV., p. 531. 



- XII., p. XXV. 3 Op. cit., p. 335, et seq. 



* In " Foraminifera from an Upper Cambrian Horizon in the Malverns," Q. J. 

 Geol. Soc, Ivi. (1900), pp. 257-263, pi. xv. 



^ Journ. Quekett Micr. Club, ser. 2, xii. (1913), pp. 1-16, pis. i.-iii. 



^ XII., pp. xxxiii and xxxvii. ' XII., p. vii. 



' The splendid series of Memoirs upon which Reuss's fame rests only began 

 in this year with his " Versteinerungen der bohmischen Kreideformation " 

 (Stuttgart, 1845-6). His earlier paper in Geinitz' " Gruudriss der Versteine- 

 rungenskunde," of the same date, deserves all that d'Orbigny says of it. 



