268 P. TF. Stuart-Menteath—Salt Deposits of Dax, etc, 



80 certainly misleading as regards their age at special points, that they 

 have been selected as a favourite quarry of evidences for the existence 

 of Pliocene man. In the Appendix to the French edition of Lyell's 

 "Antiquity of Man" an example is cited from Biarritz as clearly 

 beneath the Pliocene Sables des Landes. In thirty pages of the Bui. 

 Soc. Ramond of 1878, together with a section of unusual detail, I proved 

 that the remains in question were from modern peat, and later than 

 beds which have since supplied me with a tooth of Mephas primigenius. 

 At both Biarritz and throughout the Landes, the sand classed as 

 Pliocene is separated from the underlying Tertiary and Glacial 

 Diluvium by a remarkable Brick-clay, similar to that of Portobello, 

 near Edinburgh. This clay is described as strangely anomalous 

 in position, because it always appears to overlie the Sables des Landes, 

 for the simple reason that it does overlie them, as amply proved by 

 local observers. At Biarritz it caps the hill beside the Negresse 

 Station, while the coarse Glacial Diluvium lies beneath it to the 

 margin of the Negresse lake. Blown sands above this supposed 

 Tertiary have furnished the human remains of Biarritz and Dax, 

 whose real age is consequently indeterminate, but trifling. My 

 conclusions were stigmatized as lamentable, but my facts have 

 remained unquestioned, and the Pliocene man in question is regularly 

 cited like his colleague of the Lisbon Congress, who was condemned 

 ^s spurious both at Lisbon and at Paris by the judges specially 

 selected to report upon the facts. In the Bull. Soc. Geol. of 1896 

 I have further dealt with the Sables des Landes, and I was in 

 agreement on the point with the regretted Munier-Chalmas. Their 

 Pleistocene age is admitted in the last edition of De Lapparent's 

 treatise. 



For further details I must refer to the first volume of the 

 " Memoires pour servir a I'expli cation de la Carte Geologique detailee 

 de la France" (1903), published by the Ministere des Travaux Publics, 

 in which ample references to my original papers, and a tabulation 

 of the fossils of the Pyreuean Trias which finally rewarded persistent 

 search, are conveniently arranged for every scientific library. 



In the first place, I succeeded in finding beside the salt-mines 

 of Villefranche (near Biarritz) abundant and unsuspected deposits 

 of the fossils previously classed as Neocomian, and vfhich are 

 now admitted to represent the base of the Upper Cretaceous of 

 the Pyrenees. This formation further supplied me, south of Ii'un, 

 with sixteen species of Cephalopoda of the Cretaceous horizon of 

 Ammonites inflatus, comparable to that of Portugal, and in the middle 

 of rocks mapped as Trias. In all the Western Pyrenees this formation 

 rests unconforraably on all previous rocks, and is in direct contact 

 with the Trias, Jurassic, etc., by a bitumen or lignite horizon 

 representing an ancient land or coast surface. To this bituminous 

 horizon one can attribute the important bitumen of Bastennes, near 

 Dax, which was formerly worked by an English company to supply 

 the earliest Parisian asphalt, and is largely described in Ure's 

 Dictionary. It flowed into Tertiary beds in the neighbourhood 

 of an ophitic intrusion, and supplies beautiful moulds of the Tertiary 



