STRATIGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY. 525 



adhere firmly to D'Orbigny's sub-division and nomenclature, 

 and where necessary to form sub-groups and sub-stages. Thus 

 Renevier gave to the passage-beds between Urgonien and 

 Aptien at the Perte du Rhone, the distinctive name of Rho- 

 danien, and the name of Vraconien to the uppermost horizons 

 of the Gault in the Jura of the Waadt Lands. Again, Pictet 

 separated certain basement beds of the Neocomian in the 

 French Rhone Valley as a sub-stage, Berriasien, characterised 

 by special fossils also widely distributed in the Alps and 

 Carpathians and in Algeria. 



The Cretaceous deposits play a relatively subordinate part 

 in the Swiss and Eastern Alps and in the Carpathians, and 

 could not be properly understood until the stratigraphy 

 of extra-Alpine Cretaceous formations had been elucidated. 

 In Switzerland, Studer had as early as 1836 demonstrated 

 the presence of Lower Cretaceous deposits near Interlaaken, 

 and afterwards Studer and Escher von der Linth together 

 studied the Cretaceous rocks at Lake Lucerne, the Glarnisch 

 and Sentis mountains. Renevier, Favre, and Schardt have 

 chiefly contributed to the knowledge of the interesting Creta- 

 ceous sequence in the Waadt Lands and Savoy Alps. 



The Vorarlberg Cretaceous deposits were examined by Von 

 Richthofen, Giimbel, and Vacek, those of the Bavarian Alps 

 by Giimbel. In the Austrian Alps the " Gosau Strata" have 

 yielded a remarkable profusion of well-preserved fossils. In 

 1822, Ami Boue observed these fossils on the cliffs near 

 Wiener Neustadt; he thought at first that they were Jurassic, 

 but afterwards included them in the Greensand formation. 

 Keferstein united them (1827) with the Tertiary "Flysch," 

 although Count Miinster had identified Cretaceous species 

 amongst the fossils. Murchison likewise placed the Gosau 

 marls in the Tertiary epoch, but ascribed a greater age to 

 the Hippurite or Rudistes limestone with which they are 

 associated. 



The Austrian geologists wavered between Gault and Upper 

 Cretaceous as the systematic position of the Gosau marls, until 

 in 1852, just thirty years after their first discovery, Zekeli 

 concluded from his investigation of the Gosau gastropods, 

 that the strata containing them must be the equivalent 

 of D'Orbigny's Turonien and Senonien. Reuss agreed with 

 this view in the main, but thought the Gosau complex chiefly 

 corresponded to the Turonien horizon and only partially to the 



