Mr, Gochvin- Austen's Address, 471 



greatly wanting, when he attempts to sketch out, in consecutive 

 order, the history of any district, however limited and however 

 simple it may be. He may know that the Nummulitic period was 

 subsequent to the Cretaceous, and also that everywhere an interval of 

 time has separated them ; but he does not know, nor has he any 

 means of ascertaining, how long that interval was ; and though he 

 may know all the details of the successive conditions of the thick 

 series of depositions exhibited in the London basin, and have satisfied 

 himself of the great extension they must once have had beyond their 

 present area, yet of the process by which so much has been removed 

 he does not know anything, nor of what was being done in any other 

 region of the globe when so much was being undone here. All that 

 can be said is, that here, in the south and east of England, the 

 Nummulitic strata were cut back to a line along which are now 

 Sudbury, Ipswich, and Yarmouth, and that beyond, on the west and 

 north, stretched away the bare Chalk hills of Suffolk and Norfolk, 

 northwards still, into the wolds of Lincoln and York. 



For our present outline we need not go further back than this in 

 East- Anglian Geology ; at the time of the early marine formations of 

 Kainozoic age, the British-Islands group was united, as a whole, with 

 a broad European-continental region. 



The Kainozoic formations of Western Europe have a striking uni- 

 formity in their general history ; those of Spain and Portugal — next, 

 those of the Bordeaux basin and of Touraine, with its Breton de- 

 pendency — finally that of our North-Sea basin, were all indents from 

 the great Atlantic ; and, in all, the character of the fauna is 

 Atlantic. It is also noteworthy that in each of these southern 

 and now dessicated sea-basins the fauna is more southern than 

 that now living in the adjacent seas, that the fossil mollusca of 

 the Tagus beds present Senegambian relationships, that so, too, do 

 those of the Lower Bordeaux beds. The Upper Bordeaux beds are 

 southern and Lusitanian in their fauna, as are those of Touraine and 

 Brittany, and partly so the older Crag of Suffolk, Belgium, and 

 Germany. The southern relations of these several assemblages grow 

 weaker from south to north, whilst in the North- Sea basin distribu- 

 tion from another quarter shows itself, in the presence of its many 

 Transatlantic forms. In this there is evidence of a twofold change — 

 First, a set or extension northwards of a marine fauna which in its 

 recognised forms is West African, afterwards becoming less southern 

 over the same areas ; such was the zoological change which the lapse 

 of time brought with it. Next, the areas of these formations are 

 first presented as terrestrial surfaces, then as lateral branches of the 

 Atlantic, lastly as laid bare again ; and this process seems to have 

 proceeded from south northwards. The comparison of the whole of 

 the fauna of ihQ Tagus beds with the whole of that of the Bordeaux 

 basin suggests that the first had been wholly laid dry before the other ; 

 so likewise between the Bordeaux basin and that of the Loire. 



The Crag-sea waters were expelled from the North- Sea area by 

 the rise of the land on the south of that great bay. The most 

 southern points for the Crag beds in Belgium are now the highest 



