304 [Jan. 17, 



sented, I believe, by Professor H. D. Rogers) is labelled, " Woods- 

 town, New Jersey;" a locality where those beds occur to which 

 the great mass of shells before alluded to belong. It is a vertebra, 

 penetrated by the green particles of the sand. Mr. Owen refers 

 this to the dorsal vertebra of a crocodile of his Proccelian division, 

 or those which, like the recent crocodiles, have the concavity in 

 the forepart, and the convexity behind. This fact is important, as 

 hitherto the Procoelian crocodiles in Europe have not been found 

 in beds older than the eocene. 



In concluding these remarks on the ferruginous and green sand 

 formation of New Jersey, I may observe that the identification 

 of four or five species out of sixty fossil shells with European 

 cretaceous fossils would give an agreement of about seven per 

 cent,, which is by no means a small amount of correspondence, 

 when we consider that the part of the United States above alluded 

 to is distant between 3000 and 4000 miles from the chalk of 

 Central and Northern Europe, and that there is more than 10° 

 difference in the latitudes of the two districts compared, on the 

 opposite sides of the Atlantic. It may doubtless be true, that the 

 influence of temperature during the Cretaceous period was less 

 powerful in limiting the range of species than it is now ; and that 

 the same forms prevailed more uniformly from India to Sweden, than 

 they do at present. Nevertheless, the cretaceous fossils of Northern 

 and Southern Europe differ sufficiently to show that the climate 

 had then no small influence in causing distinct geographical pro- 

 vinces of species ; and it seems natural that those species which 

 are very abundant in Europe, such "as Belemnites mucronatus, or 

 those which have a great vertical range, such as Pecten quinque- 

 costatus, should be the fossils found, if any, to recur in a distant 

 part of the globe. 



In the next place I proceed to give some account of the upper 

 fossiliferous division of the New Jersey cretaceous deposit, which is 

 for the most part arenaceous, but contains, in many places, layers 

 of limestone and calcareous sand, with corals slightly aggregated 

 together. It has been traced by Mr. Rogers to a distance of about 

 60 miles in a north-east and south-west direction, from Prosper 

 Town to near Salem, having rarely a breadth of half a mile, and 

 the thickness being from 6 to 20 feet. Its importance is derived, 

 geologically speaking, from its fossils, and, in an economical point 

 of view, from its affording the only lime procurable in this district. 

 I saw the formation in question, on the banks of Timber Creek, a 

 stream which flows into the Delaware, three miles below Phila- 

 delphia. The principal locality is twelve miles S. E. of Philadel- 

 phia, about a mile and a half south of the village of White Horse, 

 in Gloucester County, New Jersey. Here a bed of soft calcareous 

 stone, about 20 feet thick, is seen made up, in great part, of corals 

 of the genera Eschara, Escharina, Cellepora, Tubulipora, and 

 others*, together with the remains of echinoderms, such as Cidaris 

 and Spatangus. It contains also some shells, as Scalaria annu- 



* See the description of these corals by Mr. Lonsdale, in the Appendix. 



