414 Geological Society, 



The shells at Faxoe are chiefly in the state of casts, and among 

 them are several species of Cypraea, Conus, Mitra, and Voluta, as 

 also an Ammonite, a Patella, a Fusus, and a Cerithium. Upon the 

 whole, there are in the collection of Prince Christian of Denmark 

 132 species of fossil shells from the Faxoe beds, of which 26 have 

 been ascertained by Dr. Beck to be identical with chalk species, while 

 the rest are distinct from them, but do not agree with known tertiary 

 shells. 



Lastly, the author considers the relations of the chalk of Moen 

 with the tertiary strata of that island. The white cliffs of Moen are 

 from 300 to 400 feet in height, consisting of chalk and parallel layers 

 of nodular flint, the strata having been violently disturbed j so that 

 instead of being nearly horizontal, as at Stevensklint, they are curved, 

 and often vertical, and, upon the whole, more deranged than the chalk 

 of Purbeck and the Isle of Wight. 



The range of lofty cliffs in Moen is divided into separate masses 

 by ravines, which often intersect them from top to bottom, but are 

 in great part filled up with tertiary clay and sand, masses of which 

 appear to have subsided bodily into large fissures and chasms of the 

 fractured chalk. In consequence of these disturbances the chalk has 

 been made to alternate on a great scale with interposed and uncon- 

 formable strata of clay and sand. These alternations cannot be ex- 

 plained by supposing the detritus of the superincumbent strata to 

 have been washed in by running water into clefts j but masses of the 

 tertiary beds seem rather to have been engulfed. Several drawings 

 illustrating these dislocations accompany the memoir, and the ap- 

 pearances are compared to those exhibited by the chalk, nearly enve- 

 loped by crag, near Trimingham in Norfolk, although the entangle- 

 ment of the two formations there, is on a smaller scale. 



Dr. Forchhammer now agrees with the author in the principal con- 

 clusions above enumerated, and has discovered the disturbed chalk 

 of Moen in the South of Seeland, as also the Faxoe beds overlying 

 chalk in Mors, an island of the Lym Fiord. 



A paper was afterwards read, " On a peculiarity of Structure in the 

 Neck of Ichthvosauri, not hitherto noticed j" by Sir Philip Grey 

 Egerton, Bart.,* M.P., V.P.G.S. 



Miss Aiming of Lyme Regis discovered, a short time since, in a 

 thin bed of lias shale, near that town, a large portion of the skeleton 

 of a new gigantic species of Ichthyosaurus. Among these interesting 

 remains are the anterior cervical vertebra?, together with an occipital 

 bone, and it is to the peculiarity of structure which they present that 

 Sir Philip Egerton principally confines his observations. The occipital 

 bone, he says, on the authority of Mr. Owen, proves very satisfac- 

 torily the permanent separation of the basilar element of the occiput 



Mr. Lyell's paper, that the "Faxoe limestone" occupies an inferior posi- 

 tion in the series to the tertiary beds which Mr. Lyell compares to the 

 "argillaceous and sandy beds of the English crag," termed by Mr. Charles, 

 worth the upper or red crag. Mr. LyelTs paper was read, before Mr. 

 Charlesworth's researches on the crag had been communicated to the Geo- 

 logical Society. See Lond. and Edinb. Phil. Mag. for August, p. 81.— 

 E. W. B.] • 



