ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OP THE PRESIDENT. liU 



the water flowing from the latter would take its way across the 

 area of the present Gulf of Suez, then through the narrow defiles at 

 the commencement of the Wadi Eeiran, Hebran, and others, and so 

 away to the north and east, eroding the valleys into the forms 

 which they now present. 



The vast development of limestones which lends a special character 

 to a great portion of Palestine has been generally ascribed, by earlier 

 geologists, to the presence of a great series of strata of the Jurassic 

 or Oolitic period, capped here and there by beds of white chalk ; and 

 Eussegger and the United States explorers have expressed themselves 

 very decidedly in favour of this view. But the proofs brought for- 

 ward have always been of the weakest. Those rugged steps of bare 

 stone, up and down which wind the tracks serving in Judaea for 

 roads, are bold outcrops of successive beds of limestone, often hard 

 and dense, and even marbly in character ; but in the examination of 

 the rocks between Jaffa and Jerusalem the few fossils found, through 

 a series of beds making up 1600 feet in thickness, all belonged to 

 the zone of Ammonites Ehotomagensis*. The band of easily worked 

 stone (the melekeh of the Arabs), which, with its caves and sepul- 

 chres, and its quarries worked far under the city, forms one of the 

 most interesting features about Jerusalem, contains not a single 

 Jurassic fossil, but consists, in great part, of remains of Hippiirites 

 Syriacus, Conr. Itself about 30 feet thick, it is, at 30 feet interval, 

 overlain by another very regular bank of a harder stone (the missih of 

 the Arabs), from which the enormous blocks still seen in an angle of the 

 city wall were taken, and containing numerous fossils, especially Neri- 

 nese, with Hippurites, and a Eadiolite, probably B. Mortoni. Pur- 

 ther than this, in the hard missih marble were found, to the author's 

 great surprise, numerous examples of a JSTummulite, on seeing which 

 he naturally thought at first of Cyclostega or Cyclolina, but about 

 which he felt confident on closer examination of its spiral convolu- 

 tions, and now describes at some length under the name of Nummu- 

 lites cretacea. The statement would be unsatisfactory but for the 

 circumstance that the explorer took the specimens himself from the 

 rock in the Wadi Jos, where he saw overlying it other beds contain- 

 ing Hippurites and Ammonites ; and hence he is satisfied that one 

 species at least of Nummulite lived in the Cretaceous seas. The 

 higher strata in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem are the soft chalky 

 limestone seen on the Mount of Olives, and corresponding with the 

 Greensand, containing Ammonites of the species A. varians, Man- 

 tdli, &c. The presence of loose flints enclosing Nummulites vario- 

 laria, 'Sow., tells of the removal by denudation of upper beds which 

 are seen further east, where the flints form regular bands in a light- 

 coloured chalk, and where, as M. Louis Lartet has pointed outf, the 

 upper chalk beds pass insensibly into the Tertiary, the stratification 

 and lithological character remaining identical, whilst Dr. Fraas 

 holds that the fossils in the upper part of the section imply a transi- 



* [Dr. Duncan determined the Middle Cretaceous age of the rocks of Sinai 

 in 1866. See Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxiii. p. 38. — Edit.] 

 t Bull, de la Soc. Geol. de France, torn. xxii. 1865. 



