Ch. X.] UPEAISED MARINE STRATA. 121 



One of the deltas of transported matter, or, as M. Morlot styles 

 them, flattened cones, is seen at the mouth of the Tiniere, a torrent 

 which enters the lake on its south side, near Villeneuve. Its internal 

 structure has heen laid open by a railway cutting, which has exposed 

 to view three layers of vegetable soil, each of which has once formed 

 the surface of the delta. For that part of the cone which is above the 

 level of the lake is for the most part covered with vegetation, as are 

 generally the higher and unsubmerged parts of all river deltas. The 

 uppermost of these old buried soils, about five feet deep from the 

 present surface, contained Roman tiles and a coin ; in the soil next 

 below, six inches thick and ten feet from the surface, were found pot- 

 tery and instruments of the bronze epoch ; and in the third soil, which 

 was half a foot thick and nineteen feet deep, pottery, pieces of char- 

 coal, bones, and a human skeleton having a small, round, and very 

 thick skull, of the brachycephalous type (fig. 104, p. 113) M. Mor- 

 lot estimates the Roman relics as about seventeen centuries old, those 

 of the bronze age between 3000 and 4000 years, and those of the 

 stone period from 5000 to 7000 years. To the entire delta he ascribes 

 an antiquity of about 10,000 years, while he conjectures that the 

 higher cone or delta, which is ten time's as large, may have taken 

 about 100,000 years for its formation. It contains, as above stated, 

 the remains of the mammoth, and is probably contemporaneous, in the 

 geological sense of the term, with the gravels of Amiens and Abbe- 

 ville, from which so many flint implements of an antique type have 

 been extracted. The above calculation does not pretend to be more 

 than a rude approximation to the truth. Ancient as are the upper 

 terraces when compared to historical times, they are certainly post- 

 glacial, or more modern than the glacial period, which will be treated 

 of in the next chapter. In other words, the Alpine glaciers had 

 already shrunk nearly into their present contracted limits before even 

 the higher deltas, containing the mammoth bones, were formed. 



Upraised marine strata with pottery in Sardinia. — The most eleva- 

 ted marine strata of the post-pliocene period in Europe, in which 

 articles of human workmanship have yet been noticed, are those 

 observed on the south coast of Sardinia, near Cagliari, so well de- 

 scribed by Count Albert de la Marmora. They consist of a breccia, 

 containing fragments of limestone and numerous shells of living 

 Mediterranean species, such as the eatable oyster and mussel, with 

 both valves united. Among these shells, pieces of pottery of a very 

 rude kind are dispersed. They are traceable to a height of 300 feet 

 above the sea. In the vegetable soil covering such marine strata, frag- 

 ments of a more modern or Roman pottery have been found. There 

 are also in the rocks- of the same district numerous fissures filled with 

 breccia, containing the remains of terrestrial quadrupeds, some of 

 them of extinct species. These breccias, although very ancient, as 

 shown by mammalian bones, are more modern than the marine 

 post-pliocene strata with pottery above mentioned, for some of the 



