218 Notices of Memoirs — 



sequent remodelling of the Ehine valley so well, for tlie coarse 

 gravel of Eppelsheim and other places round Mayence and Worms 

 shows a deteriorating and apparently far younger Vertebrate Fauna, 

 differing so widely from that of the Hydrobian Limestone that it is 

 impossible not to recognize the gap between the two. It is, however, 

 only in the Mayence Basin that these gaps are visible. In France 

 they appear to be so completely filled up by three successive Faunas 

 that the gradual replacing of the older species by newer ones nearly 

 related to them is demonstrated with the greatest certainty. Near 

 Eppelsheim we find, instead of the hornless Euminant Dorcatherium, 

 and Stags, the south Asiatic Muntjaek (Prox), with simple bifurcate 

 horps, along with Ehinoceroses with and without horns. These, how- 

 ever, do not long remain the largest forms in this wonderful Faima, 

 as they are soon surpassed by the gigantic Proboscidians, represented 

 by Dinotherium and Mastodon. Swarms of Sippotherium lived in the 

 woods ; Stags on the prairies, often threatened by an immense 

 carnivore (Machairodus), whose teeth exhibited the true type of the 

 beast of prey on a scale yet more fearful than that of the Tiger ; 

 while the smaller predacious animals of the Civet-cat type had 

 apparently to content themselves for food with the small vegetable 

 feeders, which were for them but meagre booty. 



The condition of the Upper Eheinthal during this time was still 

 very different from what it is at present, for what is now the Kaiser- 

 stuhl, standing isolated in the plain, was then joined to the nearest 

 Jurassic hills, and formed with them a watershed. On the south 

 side of this the brooks carried Vosges pebbles as far as Delsberg in 

 the Bernese Jura, in which the remains of Dinotherium are buried ; 

 while where the Birs now hastens northward to the Ehine, a river, 

 which held the same course as the Ehine does now, brought Schwarz- 

 wald and Vosges stones, and some from the Langenbruck district 

 of the Jura to Eppelsheim. From this time onward the gradual 

 development of the valley becomes more difficult to follow. It 

 appears as if the greater part of the strata of the older deposits, still 

 remaining elsewhere till the beginning of the Diluvial period, have 

 been partly carried away by denudation during the modelling of the 

 older into the modern river-valley, and have partly been covered 

 with newer pebbles to so great a height since this later modification, 

 that traces of these old terraces can be recognized in but very few 

 places. 



The Ehine valley has no equivalent of the Fauna of Perrier in 

 France and of Norwich in England, which contains, along with the 

 latest Mastodon, the oldest true Elephant ; neither has it the newer 

 " Forest-beds," those old forests sunk under the sea, which extend 

 forty miles out from the coast of Norfolk ; nor the contemporary 

 sands of St. Priest and St. Martial in France, where we find 

 Machairodus along with the first typical Bears and Dogs, gigantic 

 Stags and Eed Deer, Stags of Virginian type with serrated horns bent 

 inwards [Genus verticornis of Boyd Dawkins), and Aurochs. We 

 might, from their Flora, assign the well-known brown coal-beds 

 near Durkheim, in. the Ehine valley, to this period ; but as yet they 



