p. W. Stuart- Menteath — On the Pyrenees. 351 



granite as penetrating the Cretaceous ; but he has confused the 

 question by assuming that the red marble produced here by alteration 

 of the Cenomanien limestone is Devonian, being unacquainted with 

 the numerous points at which exactly similar marble is produced in the 

 former formation with characteristic fossils in the Western Pyrenees. 

 Two recent surveys at Salies have proved to me the identity of the 

 ground with that of Capvern. As regards the supposed Trias, its 

 introduction by M. Carez is equally theoretical. The fault he figures 

 is impossible, and, in accordance with every engineer acquainted 

 with the plans and borings of similar salt deposits throughout the 

 Pyrenees, I regard the salt as Tertiary and connected with the 

 ophites. It occupies a crater of explosion, excavated to more than 

 1,000 feet deep across all the rocks of the district older than the 

 Oligocene, and has been deposited in that crater at about the same 

 time as the more lagunar Oligocene salt of the entire Spanish slope 

 of the Pyrenees. The red marls are everywhere an accompaniment 

 of the ophite at its junction with any formation which it happens 

 to traverse. The map of M. Carez ignores the fact that extensive 

 volcanic breccias extend across his supposed fault, and are a common 

 characteristic of the entire sub-Pyrenean plateau, of which the 

 environs of Salies are merely a normal specimen. He supposes 

 here an island, in which peculiarly destructible variegated marls 

 could have resisted the destructive action of the Cretaceous sea, 

 while at the Pic de Bugarach he refuses to recognize such an island 

 in a mass of peculiarly tough dolomite. Yet no such islands can be 

 recognized in the neighbourhood of Salies, while they are admitted 

 to exist at three miles from the Pic de Bugarach. The most striking 

 analogies, as well as every detail of the ground, are ignored in the 

 theory presented to the Congress. The progress of Pyrenean geology 

 has been hampered at every point by similar attempts to discredit 

 all local research by the hasty reproduction of its incompletely 

 published results. 



The prolongation of the rocks of Salies is presented by M. Carez 

 at Capvern, where the concealing diluvial sheet of the Lannemezan is 

 removed from the underlying rock plateau. Here he admits the 

 presence of granite, because the main road between the two thermal 

 establishments is cut through its ramifying veins. But he assumes 

 that the rocks which these veins cut must be Triassic, and states 

 that the granite " seems ante-triassic." Off the high road I have 

 found a granite vein of less than four feet in thickness, and exposed 

 along about a hundred yards, at 700 metres north-west of the castle 

 of Mauvezin, cutting vertically through the entire Flysch, which 

 with characteristic composition, structure, and fucoids, forms the 

 whole district, resting on the Cenomanien limestone, precisely as 

 at Salies and in the entire sub-Pyrenean plateau. No practical 

 geologist visiting Capvern, with these indications, can fail to 

 recognize the volcanic breccias intercalated in the Flysch, which 

 attest the Cretaceous age of the intrusions. 



A few miles to the south-west, at Ossun, Ade, Julos, etc., M. Carez 

 now admits that both granite and ophite penetrate the same Cretaceous 



