254 Elie de Beaumont's Researches on some of 



their last travels on the Continent. This system includes the 

 whole chain of the Pyrenees, the northern and some other 

 ridges of the Apennines, the calcareous chains to the N.E. of 

 the Adriatic, those of the Morea, nearly the whole Carpathian 

 chain, and a great series of inequalities continued from that 

 chain through the N.E. escarpment of the Hartz mountains 

 to the plains of Northern Germany. Through the whole of 

 these vast regions the principal inequalities range nearly pa- 

 rallel to each other, and have a mean bearing about west- north- 

 west and east-south-east. So far again the statement is purely 

 geographical, and its truth is seen at once in glancing over 

 any good physical map of Europe ; and will be still more clearly 

 comprehended, by comparing some of the principal ranges of 

 colour on Von Buch's great geological map with the bearing 

 of the Pyrenees. But it is followed by a series of co-extensive 

 geological phipnomena. 



Through all parts of this great system, formations of the 

 a"e of the green-sand and chalk have had an enormous deve- 

 lopment, and without exception, their strata are ruptured and 

 contorted, and often lifted up to the very pinnacles of the 

 mountains. But on the contrary, wherever any tertiary for- 

 mations approach the confines of this system, they are stated 

 to be either in a position almost as horizontal as the surface 

 of the waters in which they were deposited; or if they have 

 been moved at all, it is by forces uninfluenced by the parallels 

 of the older chains. And the same three conclusions, with 

 a mere difference of dates, follow here as in the former case. 

 All the great parallel ridges and chains of this second system 

 must have been suddenly and violently elevated, and at a pe- 

 riod of time between the deposition of the chalk and the com- 

 mencement of the tertiary groups; and the corresponding 

 change in organic types is, in this instance, still more striking 

 than in the former. 



X. System of the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia. — The 

 beds named tertiary are far from constituting a continuous 

 whole. Many interruptions are observable in them, each of 

 which may have corresponded with an elevation of moun- 

 tains effected in countries more or less near our own. 



An attentive examination of the nature and geographical 

 disposition of the tertiary rocks in the north and south of 

 France, has led me to divide them into two series: one, which 

 is composed of the plastic clay, the calcaire g)-ossier, and the 

 whole gypseous formation, including the upper marine marls, 

 scarcely passes to the S, or S.W. of the environs of Paris; 

 whilst the other, represented in the North by the grcs de Fon- 

 lainebleau, the upper freshwater formation, and the fahlnns, 



comprises. 



