22 Si H. H. Howorth—The True Horizon of the Mammoth. 
this lignite bed as of small extent. In the next place, it is 
unfortunate that this particular and most important section should 
have been entirely covered up, and be no longer available 
for study. It is also unfortunate that it sbould have been an 
artificial and not a natural section. Mortillet has pointed out that 
such sections made by workmen, and not under the eye of scientific 
men, are very unsatisfactory. Speaking of this very section, he 
tells us how easy it is in deep pits through soft strata, to have 
a slipping of positions of the beds. M. Charles Grad, again, in 
discussing it, says that it was much disturbed. He had himself 
noticed a streak of gravel traversing the lignite; in another place 
the same lignite was penetrated by a wedge of clay. In some 
places it rested in small pockets on the gravel and the clay, in 
others it was standing vertically, and merely covered by vegetable 
soil. “These circumstances point,” he says, “to slipping or crushing 
of the lignite beds after they were formed.” This description, by 
one who examined it, and the conclusion forced upon him, surely 
destroy the whole value of the section as a crucial and critical 
test, and, as Mortillet suggests, it points to the supposed subjacent 
Glacial beds, having been accidentally, and not naturally, so placed. 
The stratigraphical evidence of the lignites we have described is 
completely at one with that of the animal remains found in them. 
These do not consist of the Mammoth and the Woolly Rhinoceros, 
but of the EH. antiquus and R. leptorhinus, the same beasts found in 
the Forest Bed, which is at an earlier horizon than that where the 
Mammoth occurs, and @ fortiori one more unlikely to occur among 
true glacial beds, and which is in front overlain by them. Neumayr, 
in his “ Hrdgeschichte,” says that similar remains occur in the 
beds at St. Jacob, on the Biros, near Basle; in the Algau, near 
Somthofen ; at Chambery and Sonnaz, in Savoy; and at Leffe and 
Val Gandino, in Upper Italy ; in none of which places is the bed 
in which they occur intercalated between glacial beds. 
M. Favre, in his paper on the beds in the neighbourhood of 
Geneva, says distinctly that the glacial beds with their erratics, 
which are greatly developed there, are superimposed on the so-called 
‘alluvion ancienne,” 7.e. the stratum in which the Pleistocene animals 
occur ; and he adds, ‘‘ Nous n’avons pu decouvrir dans les environs 
de Geneve aucune preuve de l’existence de deux epoques glaciaires.” * 
At Chambery in Savoy, some lignites have occurred in which 
although no Mammalian remains have been found, plant remains 
occur, showing them to be on the same horizon as the lignites of 
Diirnten and Utznach. Their age, says Mortillet, is perfectly estab- 
lished, they are anterior to the great extension of glaciers, whose 
products, clays, striated pebbles and erratic blocks overlie them. 
Mortillet continues thus: “Le lignite de Chambéry est tout 4 fait 
analogue, comme constitution et aspect physique. & celui des Cantons 
de Zurich et de St. Gall. Le gisement est semblable et tous les deux 
sont pré-glaciaires.” ? 
1 Bull. Soc. Geol. de France, ser. iii, vol. iii. pp. 659-660. 
* Le Préhistorique, pp. 216, 217. 
