276 



LETTER XIX. 



FOSSIL CROCODILES TWO SPECIES FOUND IN FRANCE, DIFFERING 



FROM ANY KNOWN SPECIES FOSSIL SPECIES FOUND ALSO IN 



ENGLAND. 



1 HE fossils which we shall now examine will, I doubt not, excite in 

 you a considerable degree of interest ; since they have been found in such 

 a state, and in such numbers, as to allow of their comparison with the 

 correspondent parts of animals of the same genus ; and since they have 

 been thus compared by M. Cuvier. 



These fossils were collected in the neighbourhood of Honfleur,. by the 

 Abbe Bachelet, an assiduous naturalist at Rouen, and were sent, by orders 

 of the Prefect of the department, to the Museum of Natural History ! Similar 

 fossils are also obtained at Havre. They were found in a bed of hard 

 limestone, of a bluish grey colour, which becomes nearly black when 

 wet, and which is found along the shore on both sides of the mouth of 

 the Seine, being in some places covered by the sea, and in others above 

 its level, even at high water. 



This bed, M. Cuvier observes, is certainly more ancient than the im- 

 mense mass of clay which rests on it, and which rises in cliffs of 300 or 

 400 feet in height, forming the whole of Caux, a part of Auge, and 

 spreads into Picardy and Champagne, and even into England. These 

 bones of crocodiles, as well as those of lizards, in Thuringia, belong, then, 

 to strata considerably anterior to those which contain the bones of qua- 



