xlvill PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. ~ 
Lyell; investigations which not only do Mr. Bunbury so much credit, 
but which give promise of yet more extended researches in the field 
of fossil botany by our Foreign Secretary. 
Sir Roderick Murchison, in his introductory remarks to the me- 
moir of Captain Vicary on the geology of parts of Sinde, has shown, 
from the observations of that officer, the probability of the nummu- 
litic limestones of the Hala mountaims bemg surmounted by tertiary 
shelly conglomerates and beds charged with the bones of quadrupeds 
(many of which are of the same character as those found or described 
by Major Cautley and Dr. Falconer), and that the western limits may 
be defined of the coast-lme, first laid down by Dr. Falconer, along 
which terrestrial animals lived at a tertiary epoch, for a very consi- 
derable distance in Asia. In this respect the information afforded is 
highly valuable, proving the extent and magnitude of those aceumu- 
lations, skirting coasts, while the mass of the lands of India was de- 
pressed beneath the sea. 
In the descending order of the Sinde formations Captain Vicary 
notices, beneath the ossiferous beds, a coarse arenaceo-caleareous rock 
with Cytherea exoleta? and exarata, and Spatangi. Under this 
comes a pale arenaceous limestone with Hyponyces, Nummulites 
and Charoidee ; then the mass of the nummulitic rock of the Hala 
range, supported by black slates of which the thickness is unknown. 
The continuation of these nummulitic rocks over so great a distance, 
one extending across from Hindostan to the great Mediterranean 
accumulations of the same kind, would pomt to the prevalence of 
similar general conditions over a very great distance ; conditions also 
continuous during a long lapse of geological time, during which con- 
temporaneous accumulations tock place in many parts of Europe of 
so varied a character, that convenient geological divisions can be made 
in them, and of which those great nummulitic deposits afford little 
or no trace. Indeed, all attempts to divide them, with reference to 
the former, have hitherto failed, and at present no good lines can be 
drawn between beds which may be of the tertiary epoch, and others 
which may even represent part of the oolitic or jurassic series of the 
British islands and many other parts of Europe. 
Although Mr. Prestwich’s memoir on the probable age of the 
London clay and its relations to the Hampshire and Paris tertiary 
systems was read at the meeting of this Society immediately pre- 
ceding the last anniversary, and therefore does not strictly come 
within the number of those included among the communications to 
the Society during the past year, yet as it is intimately connected 
with his paper on the main points of structure and the probable age 
of the Bagshot sands, and on their presumed equivalents in Hamp- 
shire and France, and these memoirs are printed together in our 
Journal of 1847, it is desirable to consider them together. It was 
the chief object of Mr. Prestwich, in the first of these papers, to 
prove that the London clay of Highgate, Sheppy, and other places in 
the vicinity of London was not, as had hitherto been considered, syn- 
chronous with the calcaire grossier of the Paris tertiary district, nor 
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