ANNIVEESAKY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. Ixix 



and when the water of the sea became shallower in consequence 

 of the matter which had been deposited, animal life again began 

 to swarm, and the upper part of the Grreat Oolite is as rich in 

 fossils as the lower is poor." But the Cephalopods were scarce, 

 and the character of the fauna was altogether different from that 

 of the Fuller's earth, and particularly of the Inferior Oolite, where 

 Cephalopods abounded, which in the former attained to a colossal 

 size. 



Dr. Waagen has published at Munich during the past year an 

 interesting work entitled " The Jura in Franconia, Swabia, and 

 Switzerland." His object is to describe the Liassic and Oolitic 

 formations from their base upwards to the Kelloway, Oxford, and 

 Kimmeridge clays, ending with slight indications of the Purbeck 

 beds in the Canton of Neuchatel. The author considers the 

 Avicula-contorta beds to form the basis of the Jura, but he does 

 not go into any detailed account of it, and adopting the views 

 of the geologists of the south-west of Grermany, he looks upon 

 it as forming the upper member of the great Keuper formation. 



Dr. Waagen has carefully studied his subject, and has looked 

 beyond the mere physical facts which came under his notice. His 

 views respecting the nature of the continents and shores washed 

 by the ancient seas during the Liassic period, the gradual changes 

 which took place in the sea-bottom by the rising or sinking of 

 the land, thereby facilitating the growth of coral-reefs in deepen- 

 ing seas, or the increase of the littoral genera of MoUusks by 

 their becoming shallower, and, by still further risings, again pro- 

 ducing swamps and marshes fitted for the wallowings and suste- 

 nance of Teleosaurian, Pterodactyle, and gigantic Saurians, are 

 full of interest, and are not altogether devoid of a certain amount 

 of poetic feeling in the description. As when he describes in 

 the following words the satisfaction which the true inquirer of 

 nature must feel on leaving the barren wastes of sand and marls 

 of the Keuper, when he comes upon the Jurassic deposits, so rich m. 

 their remains of organic life,- " there is something very elevating 

 in thus examining these witnesses of a long past period, witnesses 

 which tell us of events which no human eye beheld. They unfold a 

 picture, and place us on the shores of that ancient ocean, the dwell- 

 ing-place of all those organic beings, where the waves of the sea 

 rolled on a sandy shore, where woods of curiously branched Coni- 

 ferse stretched along the coast, mixed with groups of palmiferous 

 Cycadese. The land must during all that Liassic period, as well as 

 probably during that of the Dogger or Brown Jura, have sloped 

 very gradually towards the sea, and the ebbing tides must have 

 left exposed large tracts of country covered with a peculiar 

 vegetation, affording an abode to the Teleosaurians and Pterodac- 

 tyles of the Lias." 



As the author has evidently devoted great attention to his 

 subject, it may be useful to point out how, in ascending order, he 

 divides and subdivides the formations to which he gives the 

 comprehensive name of Jura. 



