735 
tered in Spitzbergen, that south-west winds are usually accompanied 
by rain and thaw even in December and January. 
A paper was then read, ‘On the Tertiary Formations! and their 
connexion with the Chalk in Virginia and other parts of the United 
States,” by Charles Lyell, Esq., V.P.G.S. 
Having examined the most important cretaceous deposits in New 
Jersey, Mr. Lyell preceeded, in the autumn of 1841, to investigate 
the tertiary strata of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, with a view 
to satisfy himself, first, how far the leading divisions of the tertiary 
strata along the Atlantic border of the United States agree in aspect 
and organic contents with those of Europe; and, secondly, to ascer- 
tain whether any rocks containing fossils of a character intermediate 
between these of the cretaceous or the eocene beds really exist... The 
conclusions at which he arrived, from his extensive survey, are given 
briefly as follows :—1. The only tertiary formations, which the author 
saw, agree well in their zoological types with the eocene and miocene 
beds of England and France; 2. he found no secondary fossils in 
those rocks which have been called upper secondary, and supposed to 
constitute a link between the cretaceous and tertiary formations, 
1. Virginia.—The tertiary strata bordering the James River, Mr. 
Lyell says, have been well described by Prof. H. D. Rogers and Dr. 
Rogers* ; and, he adds, they are also noticed in Mr. Conrad’s ex- 
cellent work on the tertiary strata of the United States. At Rich- 
mond, Mr. Lyell examined the remarkable bed of infusorial clay 
described by Prof. Rogers+, consisting of an impalpable siliceous. 
powder derived from cases of microscopic animalcules. It varies in 
thickness from twelve to twenty-five feet, and is interposed between 
eocene greensands and miocene clays; but Mr. Lyell agrees with 
Prof. Rogers in considering it as probably belonging to the former 
epoch. c $2): 
Similar eocene greensands, very much resembling the cretaceous 
greensand of New Jersey, occur at Petersburg, thirty miles south of 
Richmond, and are overlaid by a large deposit of miocene marls 
abounding in testacea different from those of the subjacent sands. 
Among the fossils of the latter deposit are a Venericardia. scarcely 
distinguishable from V. planicosta of the London clay, also an Ostrea 
almost equally near to the Ostrea bellovacina and the QO, selleformis, so 
widely disseminated through the eocene formations of South Carolina 
and Georgia, is found in the uppermost beds of the formation at 
Coggin’s Point, on the James River. The part of Virginia to which 
these remarks refer, is a flat region, forty or fifty feet above the level 
of the sea. The miocene strata which compose the upper beds con- 
sist sometimes almost exclusively of shells, and in the neighbourhood 
of Williamsburg Mr. Lyell collected eighty species, which bear a 
great resemblance generically, and in their relative numerical force, 
to collections from the Suffolk crag and the Faluns of Touraine. 
* American Phil. ‘lraus., New Series, vol. v. p. 819 ef seg. 1835, and 
vol. vi. p. 847 et seq. 1839, + States’ Report, 1840. 
