306 Geological Society : — Mr. Lyell on the 



of Testacea are a species of Lunulites and several other corals, the 

 claws of Crustacea, and teeth of the Lamna family. Many of these 

 fossils occur at Rocky Point, including Pecten metnbranosus, with a 

 Lunulite and a Vermetus subsequently found by the author in the 

 limestone of the Santee canal in South Carolina. 



South Carolina and Georgia. — Charleston stands on a yellow sand, 

 beneath which is a blue clay containing the remains of Testacea that 

 inhabit the adjacent seas j and Dr. Ravenel informed Mr. Lyell 

 that he had found in it the Gnathodon cyrenoides, not now known to 

 occur in a living state nearer than the Gulf of Mexico. The author 

 could not ascertain whether this post-pliocene formation rises above 

 high-water mark ; but he states that, on the Cooper river thirty miles 

 north of Charleston, there occurs beneath the superficial sand and 

 mottled clay a freshwater formation, in which Dr. Ravenel has found 

 the remains of the Cypress, Hiccory and Cedar, which must have 

 grown in a freshwater swamp, although the formation is now six 

 feet below the level of high water. No shells have been noticed in 

 the deposit, but they are also commonly wanting in the marsh accu- 

 mulations of that region. As the salt water of Cooper river must 

 now cover much of this deposit, a very modern subsidence, Mr. Lyell 

 says, must have taken place along the coast. At Dr. Ravenel's 

 plantation in the low country near the mouth of Cooper river is a 

 pulverulent limestone, artificially exposed, which Mr. Lyell thinks 

 may be an eocene formation, though its fossils differ from those of 

 other deposits of that epoch. 



Between this point and Vance's Ferry, on the Santee river, is a 

 continuous formation of white limestone, which Mr. Lyell examined 

 with Dr. Ravenel at Strawberry Ferry, Mulberry Landing, the banks 

 of the Santee canal, Wantout and Eutaw. It varies in hardness, and 

 consists of comminuted shells ; but it very rarely exhibits any laminae 

 of deposition, and even where it attains a thickness of twenty or thirty 

 feet there would be a difficulty in determining whether it were hori- 

 zontal, if a bed of oysters, like that at Vance's Ferry, did not occa- 

 sionally occur. At the Rock bridge near Eutaw springs, the lime- 

 stone composed of comminuted shells, corals, the spines of Echini, 

 &c, resembles so precisely the upper cretaceous formations at Timber 

 Creek in New Jersey, that Mr. Lyell at first felt no doubt of the 

 identity of the two formations, although the organic contents of the 

 limestone prove that it belongs to the tertiary series. This resem- 

 blance has led to the admission into Dr. Morton's excellent work on 

 the fossils of the cretaceous group, of the Balanus peregiinus, Pecten 

 calvatus, P. membranosus, Terebratula lachryma, Conus gyratus, 

 Scutella Lyelli, and Echinus infulatus* , though they do not really 

 belong to the chalk series ; and to several other similar mistakes, 

 whereby, Mr. Lyell observes, beds of passage have been erroneously 

 supposed to exist. Among the most widely distributed of the lime- 

 stone fossils is the Ostrea sellaformis ; and he searched in vain at 

 various points throughout a distance of forty miles for an admixture 

 of characteristic cretaceous and tertiary organic remains, though the 

 * See pi. 10. of Morton's Synopsis. 



