52 REPORT—1868. 
some proportion, is specifically identical, as to forms, with such as are now known 
to be living in some region or other, 
GEOLOGICAL SUMMARY, 
Wonderful as the progress of research has been during the last fifty years, still 
the geologist finds himself greatly wanting when he attempts to sketch out in 
consecutive order the history of any district, however limited and however simple 
it may be. He may know that the Nummulitic period was subsequent to the 
Cretaceous, and also that everywhere an interval of time has separated them; 
but he does not know, nor has he any means of ascertaining, how long that inter- 
val was; and though he may know all the details of the successive conditions of 
the thick series of depositions exhibited in the London basin, and have satisfied 
himself of the great extension they must once have had beyond their present 
area, yet of the process by which so much has been removed he does not know 
anything, nor of what was being done in any other region of the globe when so 
much was being undone here. All that can be said is, that here, in the south 
and east of England, the Nummulitic strata were cut back to a line along which 
are now Sudbury, Ipswich, and Yarmouth, and that beyond, on the west and 
north, stretched away the bare chalk hills of Suffolk and Norfolk, northwards 
still, into the wolds of Lincoln and York. 
For our present outline we need not go further back than this in East-Anglian 
Geology; at the time of the early marine formations of Kainozoic age the 
British-Islands group was united, as a whole, with a broad European-continental 
region. 
“The Kainozoic formations of Western Europe have a striking uniformity in their 
general history; those of Spain and Portugal—next, those of the Bordeaux basin 
and of Touraine, with its Breton dependency—finally that of our North-Sea basin, 
were all indents from the great Atlantic, and, in all, the character of the fauna is 
Atlantic. It is also noteworthy that in each of these southern and now desiccated 
sea-basins the fauna is more southern than that now living in the adjacent seas, 
that the fossil mollusca of the Tagus beds present Senegambian relationships, that 
so, too, do those of the Lower Bordeaux beds. The Upper Bordeaux beds are 
Southern and Lusitanian in their fauna, as are those of Touraine and Brittany, and 
partly so the older Crag of Suffolk, Belgium, and Germany. The southern relations 
of these several assemblages grow weaker from south to north, whilst in the North- 
Sea basin distribution from another quarter shows itself in the presence of its many 
Transatlantic forms. In this there is evidence of a twofold change—First, a set or ex- 
tension northwards of a marine fauna which in its recognized forms is West-Afri- 
can, afterwards becoming less southern over the same areas; such was the zoolo- 
gical change which the lapse of time brought with it. Next, the areas of these for- 
mations are first presented as terrestrial surfaces, then as lateral branches of the 
Atlantic, lastly as laid bare again; and this process seems to have proceeded from 
south northwards. The comparison of the shale of the fauna of the Tagus beds with 
the whole of that of the Bordeaux basin suggests that the first had been wholly laid 
ary Lees the other had; so likewise between the Bordeaux basin and that of 
the Loire. 
The Crag-sea waters were expelled from the North-Sea area by the rise of the 
land on the south of that great bay. The most southern points for the Crag beds 
in Belgium are now the highest above the sea-level; this elevation decreases till 
we come to this place, where, if any part of the so-called Norwich Crag or the 
fluvio-marine be of that age, such estuary beds must have been then much in the 
same position as they are now, or at the sea-level. On evidence such as this, the 
North-Sea area, after the period of the early Kainozoic fauna or true Crag, is seen 
to be passing again to the condition of terrestrial surface. 
This old depression of the North-Sea area, as had the other tertiary basins, again 
became part of the general European land-surface—a northern extension of the 
Rhine valley ; and again the geologist meets with but little guidance as to the 
details of the chronology of what must have been a period of vast duration. A 
long list of land animals can be presented which have left their remains here: that 
some of these ranged over Central and Southern Europe, and included this very 
