of the Alps, Carpathians and Apennines. 215 



Italy, any words he may be cited as having spoken at that Meeting 

 are not to be taken as affecting his ultimate conclusions expressed in 

 this memoir. Since it was read he has received a letter from M. Al- 

 cide d'Orbigny, which he willingly cites both as confirming his ge- 

 neral conclusions and as bringing these deposits into close comparison 

 with the lower tertiaries of Northern Europe. " For three years," 

 M. d'Orbigny writes, " I have made the most extensive and most ge- 

 neral researches on the strata containing nummulites ; and in com- 

 paring all the stratigraphical and palaeontological results, it is im- 

 possible not to recognize therein two distinct epochs superposed the 

 one to the other, and having each its proper fauna. One of these 

 epochs, which 1 have recognized in the French Alps, the Pyrenees 

 and the Gironde, corresponds to the plastic clay of Paris and Lon- 

 don, and which, belonging to the lower sands of Soissons, I have 

 named ' ttage Suessonien' ; the other, equally common in the Alps 

 and the basins of the Gironde, and which includes the ' Calcaire 

 Grossier' of Paris up to^the gypsum of Montmartre and the London 

 clay, &c., I designate ' Etage Parisien.' These divisions, based upon 

 a considerable number of facts, are detailed in the work I am now 

 printing, and the entire composition of their characteristic faunas is 

 given in my ' Prodromus of Universal Palaeontology.' The habit I 

 have acquired of determining these fossils makes me regret that I 

 cannot go to inspect your collections in London ; but the portions 

 of them I have seen in the hands of our friend M. de Verneuil has 

 led me to recognize at once what I was already acquainted with in 

 the Pyrenees and the French Alps. Again, the fossils I have exa- 

 mined in the collection of M. TchichatchefF, confirm me in my opi- 

 nion, and would lead me to extend the limits of these tertiary stages, 

 as you have suggested, through Asia Minor and other tracts even to 

 Hindostan." 



It may be added, that in citing the able memoir of M. Coquand*, 

 Sir Roderick has expressed his opinion, that the data, though con- 

 strued differently by that author, may be so interpreted as to lead to 

 the conclusion that the mass of the rocks containing nummulites in 

 the Barbary states and the shores of the Mediterranean are, like 

 those of the Alps and Apennines, supra- cretaceous ; his own limited 

 observations in the Neapolitan territories being confirmed by the 

 local knowledge of Professor Savi. Similar conclusions are, he thinks, 

 inevitable respecting the nummulitic rocks of Egypt, on the part of 

 any one who has read Russegger's work on that country. At the 

 same time, though well-assured of his own facts, he would not con- 

 tend against the possible existence in certain southern regions, not 

 examined by him, of some one species of nummulite in strata of the 

 age of the uppermost chalk, as insisted upon for the Crimsea by M. 

 Dubois de Montpereux, and for Cape Passaro in Sicily by M. Con- 

 stant Prevost. AH that he contends for is that the great nummulitic 

 group, as characterized by a multitude of species of shells, Echino- 



* Description geologique de la partie septentrionale de I'empire de Ma- 

 roc, par H. Coqaand.—Bull. de la Soc. Geol. de France, 2nd ser. vol. iv. 

 p. 1188. 



