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



forms the bottom of the so-called CEnmgen deposit (1). The ancient 

 lacustrine expanse may indeed have occupied much of the broad valley 

 now filled by the Rhine and the Unter See or lower lake ; so that it 

 is difficult to define its former limits on the E. and N.E.* To the 

 south, however, and to the west and north-west it was manifestly 

 bounded by hills of hard pre-existing nagelflue, whose summits are 

 surmounted by erratic blocks only. No one can ascend the indestruc- 

 tible rock of nagelflue from which the castle of Hohenklingen over- 

 looks the town of Stein, and then examine the edges of the contigu- 

 ous freshwater accumulation, without coming to this conclusion. It 

 is, indeed, eiddent that the lacustrine deposit was bounded by these 

 hard rocks. The lowest beds of the CEningen basin, as seen in the 

 ravines between Stein and Wangen, and in the lower terraces under 

 the plateau of fossil limestones and marls exhibited in the preceding 

 woodcut, are incoherent, micaceous, light-grey sands, with an occa- 

 sional concretion (1) fig. 2/. They are, in fact, regenerated molasse, 

 and have been compounded out of the hard dark-coloured molasse 

 building-stone, to which they have much the same resemblance, as the 

 sands on the shore of a lake to the sandstone cliif on its sides from 

 whence they have been derived. This is, I repeat, exactly the same 

 soft stone as that which recurs at Berlingen, between Constance and 

 Stockhorn, on the opposite bank of the Rhine, and where freshwater 

 shells are found in it. 



In ascending from Wangen to the quarries, a considerable thickness 

 of these sands is exposed, and at their summit they inosculate with 

 marly and calcareous courses, in which the lower quarries (now very 

 little worked) are opened. Their strata (2) consist, on the whole, of 

 alternations of recomposed, light-grey, micaceous, calcareous molasse, 

 with thinly laminated, dark-grey marlstone and limestones of con- 

 choidal fracture, which are highly fetid under the hammer. Though 

 of irregular persistence and somewhat broken, these beds (the upper 

 part of which is ferruginous) incline slightly to the west, or away 

 from the valley of the Rhine to which they present their edges, and 

 by which inclination they are carried under all the limestone and 

 marl of the plateau. Among the fossils which they have afforded 

 are the Palceomceinx of Y. Meyer, together with portions of tortoises ; 

 but owing to the concretionary form of the beds and the irregularity 

 of their composition {i, e. sand and marlstone inosculating), the fossils 

 are neither so well preserved, nor so much sought after, as in the over- 

 Iviiig quarries of flat bedded character. 



Rising gently along the inclined surface of the plateau above the 

 lowTr quarry, the substrata around the dome-shaped ground of 

 Solenhofen are seen to consist of similar rocks passing upwards into 

 marlstones or limestones, which at the distance of about three-quarters 



* M. A. Escher de Linth makes the freshwater beds extend northwards by 

 Schienen to the valley of the Aach. I did not revisit that portion of the ground, but 

 I have perfect confidence in his section. The recent discovery, however, of fresh- 

 water shells in the underlying band at Berlingen (since M. Escher wrote) decides 

 the nature of the band (1) of my section, which he termed with doubt *' Meere's ? 

 molasse." (See Fauna der Vorwelt von H. v. Meyer, 1845, p. 49.) 



