Vicentine, and Veronese Territories. 21 
bears none of the characters of a volcanic product. Who these 
naturalists are, whether such an hypothesis was in reality ever 
published, and in particular, whether it is thus fairly repre- 
sented by Brieslak, I do not know; but his argument obviously 
cannot militate against the ideal have proposed above ; viz., that 
the calcareous sediment by which the fish were enclosed was 
put in motion by the force of some volcanic explosion, then 
suddenly precipitated together with the objects it had enve- 
loped, and almost as suddenly consolidated by the pressure 
and heat of the basalt and péperino deposited upon it. Per- 
haps the supposition which Brieslak refutes, originated in some 
confusion between the fish of Monte Bolca and the shells which 
at Montecchio and_ other points in the valleys of Ronca and 
Trissino, are occasionally found enveloped by a volcanic pepe- 
rino, with a calcareous or argillaceous cement; a singularity 
of position which they evidently owe to having been caught up 
and invested by the puzzolana and ashes ejected by a subaqueous 
volcano. 
Should the above remarks appear to you, my dear Sir, of 
any interest, you will oblige me by either inserting them 
in the next Number of the Journal of the Royal Institution, or 
as a note to any portion of the MS. I have forwarded to you, 
which they may serve to illustrate. 
The opinion I have hazarded in those “ observations” on the 
origin of the calcareous peperino which constitutes various isolated 
hills, rising fromthe plain of the Limagne d’Auvergne, has been 
very agreeably confirmed to me by all the observations I made 
on the similar rock occurring in the Vicentine and Veronese. 
The chief characters of both completely correspond, and the 
origin of each is evidently the same, with this only difference, 
that the eruptions which produced the peperino of North Italy, 
burst from the bottom of the ocean at the period of the depo- 
sition of the secondary limestone; those of Auvergne from 
beneath a fresh-water lake, possessing equally with that ocean 
the property of depositing a copious sediment of carbonate of 
lime, which in both cases is abundantly mixed with, and usually 
cements together, the volcanic fragments. 
