138 ME. H. KYNAST0N ON THE [May 1 894, 



Gosau Beds together with the Vienna Sandstone in the Flysch, 

 although Count Miinster x had already collected a number of un- 

 doubted Cretaceous fossils from the neighbourhood of Gosau and 

 Abtenau. 



Sedgwick and Murchison, as we have already seen (op. cit.), 

 placed the lowest Hippurite-limestone below the whole of the 

 Gosau series, and regarded the fossiliferous marls as passage-beds 

 between the Secondary and Tertiary systems, and the upper unfos- 

 siliferous group as Tertiary, on the same horizon as the Molasse. 

 Goldfuss, who described a number of fossils from the Gosau Valley, 

 left the question of the age of the beds open. After the year 

 1836 geologists were, on the whole, fairly well agreed as to the 

 Upper Cretaceous age of the Gosau Beds, though we still find 

 Klipstein in 1843 upholding their Tertiary age. 2 Murchison, 

 following up the investigations undertaken in conjunction with 

 Sedgwick, published in 1849 a paper on the Geological Structure of 

 the Alps, Apennines, and Carpathians. 3 In this he changes his 

 former opinion, and believes that the fossiliferous beds of Gosau are 

 the equivalents of the Gault, Upper Greensand, and Lower Chalk. 

 He still, however, thinks that the upper part of the Gosau series 

 without fossils represents a portion of the Nummulitic and Flysch 

 series of other districts, while the Hippurite-limestone is the equi- 

 valent of the Neocomian. 



Franz von Hauer in 1850 * correlated the Gosau Beds with the 

 Obere Kreide and the Planer- and Quadersandstein formation of 

 Northern Bohemia and Saxony, and later (1878), in his ' Geologie 

 der bsterr.-ungarischen Monarchic ' (p. 516), he classes them as 

 Turonian, and places the Nierenthaler Schichten, which occur at 

 Nierenthal in Bavaria and near Gmiinden in Upper Austria, in the 

 Senonian with Belemnitella mucronata and Ananchytes ovata. 



Up to about this date the fauna of the Gosau Beds was very 

 imperfectly known, and it was from the want of a more accurate 

 knowledge of this and of Cretaceous faunas in general that the 

 idea of their Tertiary or Cretaceo-Eocene age had been entertained 

 by some of the earlier observers. Probably, also, the generally 

 soft and rather crumbling nature of the deposits, and the loosely- 

 embedded mode of occurrence of the fossils, seemed to lend support 

 to this view. 



In 1852 Zekeli published a monograph on the gasteropoda, 5 in 

 which he concluded that out of 190 species only 23 occurred outside 

 the province of the North-eastern Alps, that the fauna showed a 

 highly specialized facies, and that it would be difficult to correlate 

 the beds with any known Cretaceous formation. Out of the 23 



1 Count Minister's collection is now in the Woodwardian Museum, Cam- 

 bridge. 



2 ' Beitrage zur geologischen Kenntniss der ostlichen Alpen,' p. 24. 



3 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. v. p. 157. 



4 Jahrb. d. k. k. geol. Reicbsanst. vol. i. p. 44. 



5 ' Die Gasteropoden der Gosaugebilde,' Abhandl. d. k. k. geol. Reicbsanst. 

 vol. i. pt. ii. 



