INTRODUCTION. 5 



In 1848 occurred the " United States Expedition to Explore the Dead Sea and the 

 Eiver Jordan," of which the Official Eeport l)y the commander of the expedition, Lieu- 

 tenant Lynch, was published in 1852. This report includes that of Dr. Anderson upon 

 the Geology, and that of Mr. Conrad upon the Palaeontology, of the parts explored. Be- 

 sides the shells collected by the expedition, Conrad described some others from the same 

 region which were furnished by individuals. He made by far the larger number to be 

 Jurassic forms, and the rest Cretaceous. His determinations are considered as having 

 misled Dr. Anderson in his decisions upon the geology of the country. 



In 1864 the Due de Luynes accomplished his Geological Exploration of the Dead Sea, 

 accompanied by Louis Lartet as geologist, who during the next two years published his 

 observations in several papers, printed in the Bulletin de la Society G^ologique and the 

 Comptes Eendus ; and from 1869-72 appeared in the Annales des Sciences Geologiques 

 his JEssai sur la GMogie de la Palestine ct des Contrives avoisinantes. There followed, in 

 1875, a folio volume, which includes his earlier memoirs, revised and enlarged. In the 

 chapter devoted to the Palaeontology of the Cretaceous formation is a list of moUuscan 

 fossils previously known from Palestine and Lebanon, and several new species are 

 described and iigured. 



In 1867 Professor Oscar Fraas, of Stuttgart, published an important work, being Part I 

 of his Aus dem Orient, the record of geological observations made by him in Egypt, the 

 Sinaitic peninsula, and the environs of Jerusalem. In 1877 his JurascMchten am Hermon 

 was issued, in the Jahrbuch fur Mineralogie, etc., pp. 17-30, and the next year Geologisehe 

 Beohachtungen am Libanon, or Part II of Aus dem Orient. The two parts taken together 

 supply a full catalogue of all molluscan fossils known from Syria up to 1878, including, 

 besides Conrad's recognizable species, European species of Lamarck, Sowerby, d'Orbigny, 

 and others, as well as a considerable number described by Fraas himself. That part of 

 the list found in Part 1 had been quoted in Lartet's folio of 1875. On comparing the lists 

 of Conrad, Lartet, and Fraas, it will be seen that the number of new species from Syria, 

 published since the date of Conrad's report, is not large. Of those described by Fraas, 

 sometimes too briefly for ready identification, only very few seem to have been figured. 



The most important consequence of the labors of Lartet and Fraas is the change of 

 view which they have brought about with respect to the age of tlie stratified rocks of 

 Palestine and the Lebanon region. It is now an established fact, that the great Cretaceous 

 system which, stretching in Northern Africa through Morocco and thence eastward to 

 Egypt, and southward into the Sahara and the Libyan Desert, crosses over into the penin- 

 sula of Sinai, spreads also over tlie greater part of Palestine and the ranges of Lebanon 

 and Anti-Lebanon, and probably prevails east of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, in Gilead, 

 Moab, and Tdumsea. The earlier explorers seem to have been misled by the strong 

 external resemblance of the light-colored limestones which they observed in Palestine to 

 the rocks of the White Jura of Europe, and therefore regarded them as Jurassic. 



In all Palestine proper, the Lebanon range, Coele-Syria (the Biikaa), and the Jordan 

 valley southward to Akabah, there had been found up to 1878, upon the authority of 



