TEANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 693 



Geological Congress. Amongst English writers the Miocene age of the Pikermi 

 beds appears generally admitted, as by Mr. Wallace, 1 Professor Boyd Dawkins, 3 

 Mr. E. T. Newton, 3 and many others. Professor Gaudry himself is much more 

 cautious ; he classes the fauna as intermediate between Pliocene and Miocene, and 

 only relegates it to Upper Miocene because that is the position assigned by other 

 palaeontologists to beds containing remains of Hipparion. However, in his 

 subsequent works Professor Gaudry has classed the Pikermi fauna as Miocene. 



Now, the lowest of the beds with the vertebrate fauna at Pikermi were by 

 Professor Gaudry himself found to be interstratified with a band of grey conglo- 

 merate containing four characteristic marine Pliocene mollusca — Pecten benedictus. 

 Lam.; Spondylus gaderopus, L. ; Ostrea lamellosa, Brocchi; and O. undata, Lam. 

 It should be remembered that the Pliocene fauna of the Mediterranean area is 

 the richest and most typical in Europe, and is as well known as any geological 

 fauna in the world. It should also be remembered that the Pliocene beds are well 

 developed in Greece at other localities besides Pikermi. Professor Gaudry especially 

 points out that the vertebrate remains, supposed to be those of Miocene animals, are 

 deposited in a stratum overlying a marine bed of undoubted Pliocene age, and he 

 proposes the following hypothesis to account for the presence of Miocene fossils in a 

 Pliocene stratum. The remains found at Pikermi are, he thinks, those of animals that 

 inhabited the extensive plains which in Miocene times extended over a considerable 

 proportion of the area now occupied by the Eastern Mediterranean, and which 

 united Greece to Asia ; the plains were broken up by the dislocations that took 

 place at the close of the Miocene period, and the animals escaped to the iro.mtains, 

 where they died for want of space and of food. Their bones were subsequently 

 washed down by the streams from the hills and buried in the Pliocene deposits of 

 Pikermi. 



Professor Gaudry evidently has no very profound faith in this hypoth^is, and 

 it is unnecessary to refute it at length. One fact is sufficient to show that it is 

 untenable. However sudden may have been the cataclysm that is supposed to 

 have broken up the Miocene plains of Attica, a very long period, measured in 

 years, must have elapsed before the Pliocene marine fauna could have established 

 itself. Now, the bones of mammals exposed on the surface decay rapidly ; the 

 teeth break up, the bones become brittle. It is doubtful if bones that had been 

 exposed for only five or six years would be washed down by a stream without 

 being broken into fragments ; the teeth especially would split to pieces. The con- 

 dition of the Pikermi fossils proves, I think, that they must have been buried very 

 soon after the animals died, that they were not exposed on the surface for any 

 length of time, and that they could not have been washed out of an earlier forma- 

 tion, and it appears to me incredible that the Pikermi mammals were not 

 contemporary with the Pliocene mollusca that occur in the same beds. In short, 

 I cannot but conclude that the Pikermi mammals were Pliocene r.nd not 

 Miocene. 



This view is entirely in accordance with the opinions of Theodor Fuchs. 4 He 

 has given a good account of the geology of various places in Greece, and amongst 

 others of Pikermi. He found, again, the conglomerate with Pliocene marine mollusca 

 interstratified with the basal portion of the mammaliferous beds, and he concludes 5 

 that not only is it clear that these mammaliferous beds are of Pliocene age, but 

 that a comparison of their geological position with that of the marine strata of 

 the Piraeus proves that the Pikermi beds occupy a very high position in the Pliocene, 

 and are probably the highest portion of the system as developed in the 

 neighbourhood. 



Fuchs also shows that the principal Pliocene mammaliferous beds are of later date 

 than the typical Pliocene (Subapennine) beds of Italy, and that some mammalia 

 found associated with the latter comprise forms identical with those of the Fikermi 



1 Geoqraphical Distribution of Animals, i. p. 115. 



2 Q. J. G. 8. 1880, p. 389. 



3 Q. J. G. S. 1884, pp. 284, 287, &c. 



* Denhschr. K. Acad. Wiss. M'ien, 1877, xxxvii. 2 e Abth. . ; 

 » L. c. p. 30. 



