410 Dr. A. von Koenen — Correlation of English Tertiary Beds. 

 VI. — On the Corkelation of the English Tertiary Beds with 



THOSE OF the CONTINENT. 



By Dr. A. von Koenen, of Gottingen, Germany ; For. Corr. Geol. Soc. Lond. 



SCHIMPER {Traite de PaUotitologie vegetale, t. iii, p. 680) estab- 

 lished in 1874 his Etage paleocene pour les " Sables de Eracheux, 

 Travertins anciens, Lignites et gres du Soissonnais", which are coeval 

 with the Thanet Sands and the Woolwich Series. As there is 

 a natural break between these and the London Clay ( = the French 

 Sables de Cuise), and as the Eocene contained more varied faunas 

 than the Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene Tertiaries, I accepted that 

 division in my description of the Kopenhague fauna, which formed 

 the Lower Palseocene, together with the Montien of Belgium, older 

 marine beds which are unknown in England. 



Quite recently M. Gustavo DoUfus kindly sent me his paper " On 

 the Classification of the Beds of the Paris Basin", published in the 

 Proceedings of the Geologists Association in 1909, vol. xxi, pp. 101-18, 

 where (p. 103) he says that I had proposed the term Palgeocene 

 for the Montien; "that name is now accepted by many authors and 

 the only objection we have to it is that this name was created by 

 Schimper for the ' Lower Nummulitic '," etc, I wrote about this to 

 M. Dollfus and asked him to correct this statement. Somehow these 

 errors appear singular in an otherwise most able and important paper, 

 but he told me to correct it myself, and it appears that the error has 

 been caused partly by mistake or misprint or by momentary lack of 

 memory. I need not refer to the matter further, but I must notice 

 that all the Lower Tertiaries were named ' Terrain Nummulitique ' 

 in older times, and the pre-Nummulitic part of them is exactly the 

 ' Lower Nummulitic ', the Palseocene of Schimper including the 

 Montien and the Calcaire pisolithique. 



In the same paper (p. 108) M. Dollfus tries to invalidate the 

 evidence adduced by me in my paper in the Quart. Journ. Geol. 

 Soc, May 1864, p. 98, where I showed that out of 56 species of 

 Mollusca from Brockenhurst 6 were peculiar to that locality and the 

 Headon Beds, 46 (not 43) exist in our Lower Oligocene, 21 (not 28) 

 in the Barton Clay, and 23 are characteristic Lower Oligocene species. 

 The Brockenhurst fossils mentioned by me were in the splendid 

 collection of Fred. E. Edwards (now in the British Museum), named 

 and compared by him with his Barton and High Cliff fossils. It is 

 not likely therefore that the number of species common to Brocken- 

 hurst and Barton will increase very much. On the other hand, I had 

 a large part of my Lower Oligocene fossils with me, so that they were 

 compared with the English fossils by Mr. Edwards and myself 

 directly. If I really did not mention some of the Brockenhurst 

 species in my monograph of the Lower Oligocene, I may have for- 

 gotten it or omitted them, because I had no specimens for a renewed 

 comparison. Out of twelve species of corals from Brockenhurst only 

 two are said now to be identical with species from the Paris Basin and 

 others to be similar ; that gives no proof whatever of their relative age. 

 In our Lower Oligocene, which cannot be divided into two different 

 zones, there are other genera of corals besides Balanophyllia, so that 



