282 Sir R. I. Murchison's Notes on the Alps and Apennines 



stones, — the author goes to his chief point, and proves by a 

 number of natural sections, that the opinion for which his 

 colleague and himself formerly contended, and which met 

 with so much opposition, is at length completely established, 

 — that the flanks of the Alps exhibit a true transition from the 

 younger secondare/ into the older tertiary strata. But whilst 

 this principle was correct, the author allows that his friend 

 and himself were in error in applying it to the Gosau deposits ; 

 all the lower and fossiliferous parts of which he now admits 

 to be cretaceous. In common with all the geologists of their 

 day, they alfto formed an erroneous opinion of the age of the 

 " flysch," in viewing it as secondary greensand. 



He now specially refers, as the base of all his subsequent 

 results, to a memoir of his own, read before the Geological 

 Society in 1829 {Annals of Phil, and Phil. Mag., June 1830), 

 which proved, that on the edge of the Venetian Alps, near 

 Bassano and Asolo, the white and red scaglia, or chalk, is there 

 conformably succeeded by the nummulitic and shelly deposits 

 of the Vicentine, which are unquestionably of lower tertiary 

 age, and graduate upwards through other shelly strata and 

 sandstones into marls and conglomerates with sub-Apennine 

 fossils. It has since been ascertained that deposits with the 

 same shells, Echinidse and nummulites of older tertiary 

 age enter far into the higher Alps of the South Tyrol, 

 and are there elevated to great heights on the surface of 

 limestones which represent the chalk. Natural sections are 

 then described in Savoy, Switzerland, and Bavaria, which 

 shew a clear ascending order from the Neocomian limestone 

 (a formation unknown when he formerly visited the Alps), 

 or equivalent of the lowest greensand of England, through a 

 zone charged with fossils characteristic of the gault and upper 

 greensand* into a limestone containing Inocerami and Anan- 

 chytes ovata, which, whether of white, grey, or red colour, 

 unquestionably stands in the exact place of the white chalk 

 of Northern Europe. Certain conformable transitions from 

 this inoceramous limestone up into shelly and nummulitic 



* See the excellent work of Professor Pictet of Geneva on the fossils of this 

 band of upper greensand and gault. 



