XXXVUl PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



I have dwelt thus at length on the age of the mimmuhtic series, 

 because its recognition as a tertiary deposit draws with it consequences 

 of the utmost theoretical importance, and is singularly confirmatory 

 of a remark made by M. Desnoyers many years ago in his address 

 to the French Geological Society, namely, " that the more the Alps 

 are studied the younger they grow." This saying was elicited by 

 the admission by competent observers, that certain schistose rocks of 

 great thickness, containing dark writing slates, originally classed as 

 " transition formations " by some of the followers of Werner, and 

 regarded as of palaeozoic age, were really secondary. Now we are 

 called upon to go much further ; for these same strata belong to the 

 ilysch, and therefore constitute what is by no means the base of the 

 eocene system. To the English geologist who is old enough to re- 

 member when all the soft clays and loose sands overlying the chalk, 

 some of them containing shells of species identical with those now 

 living, were looked upon as very modern, and as the creations of 

 yesterday, in comparison with the rocks of the higher Alps, it may 

 well appear a startling proposition to learn that the clay of London 

 was in the course of accumulation as marine mud at a time when the 

 ocean still rolled its waves over the space now occupied by some of 

 the loftiest Alpine summits. It will follow, moreover, as a corollary 

 from the same data, as before hinted, that not only the upheaval 

 of the Alps, but all the principal internal movements, dislocations, 

 inversions and contortions of the strata, are subsequent to the origin 

 of the nummuhtic deposits, and had not therefore even commenced 

 till great numbers of the eocene vertebrate and invertebrate animals 

 had Uved and died in succession. 



If the development of so vast an aggregate amount of dynamical 

 agency in times so modern in the earth's history had been confined 

 to a single narrow zone of mountains, it would be a fact of no small 

 significance as invalidating all theories which ascribe such magnifi- 

 cent displays of mechanical force to very remote epochs. But on 

 extending our survey, we find some of the members of this nummu- 

 litic series, with their characteristic fossils, playing the same part in 

 the Pyrenees, Apennines and Carpathians, and spreading over a large 

 part of the globe of which the geology is best known. They are met 

 with in full force in the north of Africa, as for example in Algeria 

 and Morocco ; they have been traced from Egypt into Asia Minor, 



