ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXXVU 



MM. De Beaumont and Dufrenoy, in constructing their geological 

 map of France many years before, should have referred these strata 

 in the Alps, and in the regions bordering the Mediterranean, to an 

 age anterior to the calcaire grossier of Paris, especially when we 

 learn that even now M. Agassiz affirms, that out of 139 species of 

 echinoderms described by him from the nummulitic beds of the Medi- 

 terranean, one species only is common to them and the calcaire gros- 

 sier. The same geologist maintains that all the fish of Glarus and 

 Monte Bolca, which according to the latest opinions must be classed 

 as eocene, diifer entirely from those of Sheppey *. Yet I am by no 

 means disposed to question, on the ground of this want of agreement 

 in the ichthyolites, that the Glarus slates are in truth tertiary, still 

 less to doubt that the limestone of Monte Bolca belongs to the same 

 period : I have always regarded the latter as eocene from the time 

 when I visited that locality in company with Sir Roderick I^Iurchison 

 in 1828. You have seen also, in the classification of the three suc- 

 cessive eocene formations established by Mr. Prestwich for the older 

 tertiary deposits of Great Britain, that while each division is charac- 

 terized by its peculiar assemblage of shells, a part only of the species 

 pass from one division to another, and that the specific difference of 

 the mammalia belonging to each division, and still more of the first, 

 as determined by Agassiz, is extremely marked. 



The researches, above alluded to, of Sir Eoderick Murchison in 

 the Alps in 1847, and the palaeontological evidence of various eminent 

 writers brought together by him in illustration of his views, have, I 

 think, shown unequivocally, that, together with the nummulitic lime- 

 stone, an enormous thickness of overlying strata of dark-coloured 

 slates, marls, and fucoidal sandstones, provincially called Flysch, are 

 separable from the cretaceous system of Northern Europe, and must 

 also be regarded as lower eocene. His attempt however to make out 

 a passage from the tertiary to the secondary series by means of an 

 intervening group of marls, green sandstone and impure limestone, 

 appears to me to be far less successful, since a true representative of 

 the Maestricht beds is wanting in the Alps, or is very ill-defined, and 

 no other equivalent assemblage of organic remains is enumerated 

 sufficiently rich in forms, or intermediate in character, to fill up the 

 wide gap between the eocene strata and the chalk. 

 * Bulletin, vol. v. pp. 414, 415. 



