NUMMULITE. 289 



quoted at page 97 of this volume.) They occur also in 

 the Chalk of Meudon, in the Jura Limestone of the Cha- 

 rente inferieure, and the Oolite of Calne. They have been 

 found by the Marquis of Northampton in Chalk flints from 

 the neighbourhood of Brighton. 



The Nummulite is the only Genus I shall select on the 

 present occasion from this Order. It is included in M. 

 D'Orbigny's Section Nautiloids. 



Nummulites (PI. 44, Fig. 6, 7,) are so called from their 

 resemblance to a piece of money, they vary in size from 

 that of a crown piece to microscopic littleness; and occupy 

 an important place in the history of fossil shells, on account 

 of the prodigious extent to which they are accumulated in 

 the later members of the Secondary, and in many of the 

 Tertiary strata. They are often piled on each other nearly 

 in as close contact as the grains in a heap of corn. In this 

 state they form a considerable portion of the entire bulk of 

 many extensive mountains, e. g. in the Tertiary limestones 

 of Verona and Monte Bolca, and in secondary strata of 

 the Cretaceous formation in the Alps, Carpathians, and 

 Pyrenees. Some of the pyramids and the Sphinx, of Egypt, 

 are composed of limestone loaded with Nummulites. 



It is impossible to see such mountain-masses of the 

 i-emains of a single family of shells thus added to the solid 

 materials of the globe, without recollecting that each indi- 

 vidual shell once held an important place within the body of 

 a living animal ; and thus recalling our imagination to those 

 distant epochs when the waters of the ocean which then 

 covered Europe were filled with floating swarms of these 

 extinct MoUusks, thick as the countless myriads of Beroe 

 and Clio Borealis that now crowd the waters of the polar 

 seas.* 



* We have an analogy to tliis supposed state of crowded population of 

 Nummulites in the ancient sea, in the marvellous fecundity of the northern 

 ocean at the present time. It is stated by Cuvier, in his memoir on the 



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