206 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [DeC. 13, 



further, seeing that m all situations it is capped by a zone of dark 

 green, schistose sandstone which contains fossils of the gault or upper 

 greensand, I was induced to think that it might represent the upper 

 portion of our English lower greensand, some parts of which it re- 

 sembles. It may also be compared with the " Quader Sandstein " 

 of Saxony, except that it is more brittle and quartzose. Whatever 

 the sandstone rock (c) may represent (for we found no fossils or 

 casts in it), there could be no doubt as to the next zone, or the dark 

 shale and deep green sandstone (c"^) that succeed, and which, though 

 of no great dimensions (probably nowhere exceeding 50 feet), is 

 the same excellent fossil horizon as in Savoy and Switzerland. In 

 short, it is the band so often spoken of as representing the gault and 

 upper greensand. In it we found ammonites of two or three species, 

 including A. Mantelli (Sow.), Turrilites, and the small Inoceramus 

 concentriciis (Sow.). 



Some of these fossils also occur in a lateral spur of the Griinten, 

 towards the village of Wangeritz, and others on the external face of 

 the great dome-shaped mass which, in the ravines to the east of Burg- 

 berg, exhibit this dark green sandstone passing up into a thin band 

 of hard, compact, cream-coloured limestone impregnated with chlorite ; 

 in short a hard " craie chloritee." The green sandstone is extensively 

 quarried on one of the shoulders of the Griinten to the north side of 

 the great depression called the Vustf , between the mountain and the 

 nummulite ledges (/") that run down to Burgberg, and when worked 

 out is really a very striking band. It is a mottled rock, and fre- 

 quently owes this appearance to branching flattened stems, which may 

 be Alcyonia. 



The inoceramus limestone (ct), with its chloritic base, above alluded 

 to, forms a wrapper of great thickness over the green sandstone or 

 gault, and constitutes the external coat of the mountain on its western 

 and south-western faces. It is largely and clearly exposed in the 

 breaks on the sides of the upland depression of the Gundalpe 

 Hiitte, above the Vust ravine, from whence it rises up to the summit 

 called the Hohe Wand, the cross of which stands on it, and very near 

 its junction with the inferior zone of green sandstone. In parts it is 

 of the colour of the sewer-kalk, i. e. a light grey or green colour ; 

 but above the Gundalpen, or between these chalets and the Hohe 

 Wand, it graduates into limestone as red as the scaglia of Italy, or 

 of the ^lythen mountain near Schwyz. Throughout its matrix are 

 numerous fragments, occasionally almost entire shells, of large thick- 

 shelled inocerami. This rock of the Griinten, so clearly in the posi- 



t Many of the fossils, so called, of Sonthofen, collected by the Bergmeister and 

 other persons, have been found in the beds of this broad torrent called the Vust. 

 Now, as the waters which flow into it traverse all the strata in the cretaceous suc- 

 cession, and these flank the nummulitic beds, geologists will readily understand 

 how Prof. Sedgwick and myself were formerly led to believe, by the inspection 

 of such collections, that nummulites occurred in the same beds with ammonites 

 and belemnites and small inocerami, the green sandstones above and below the 

 equivalent of the chalk often closely resembling each other. I have now satisfied 

 myself that here, as elsewhere throughout the Alps, nummulites are unknown 

 below the surface of the inoceramus limestone. 



