Oh. XIV.] UPPER MIOCENE FORMATIONS OF GREECE. 247 



Miocene strata of Italy. — We are indebted to Signor Michelotti 

 for a valuable work on the Miocene shells of Northern Italy. Those 

 found in the hill called the Superga, near, Turin, have long been 

 known to correspond in age with the faluns of Touraine, and they 

 contain so many species common to the Tipper Miocene strata of 

 Bordeaux as to induce M. Tournouer to conclude that there was a 

 free communication between the northern part of the Mediterranean 

 and the Bay of Biscay in the Upper Miocene period. In the hills 

 of which the Superga forms a part there is a great series of Tertiary 

 strata which pass downward into the Lower Miocene. Even in the 

 Superga itself there are some fossil plants which, according to Heer, 

 have never been found in Switzerland so high as the Marine Molasse, 

 such as Banlcsia longifolia, and Carpinus grandis* In several parts 

 of the Ligurian Apennines, as at Dego and Carcare, the Lower Mio- 

 cene appears, containing some nummulites, and at Cadibona, north 

 of Savona, freshwater strata of the same age occur, with dense beds 

 of lignite enclosing remains of the Anthracotherium magnum and 

 A. minimum, besides other mammalia enumerated by Gastaldi. In 

 these beds a great number of the Lower Miocene plants of Switzer- 

 land have been discovered. 



Upper Miocene formations of Greece. — At Pikerme, near Athens, 

 MM. Wagner and Roth have described a deposit in which they found 

 the remains of the genera Mastodon, Dinotkerium, Hipparion, Ante- 

 lope, two Giraffes, and others, some living and others extinct. With 

 them were also associated fossil bones of the Semnopithecus, showing 

 that here, as in the South of France, the quadrumana were character- 

 istic of this period. The whole fauna attests the former extension of 

 a vast expanse of grassy plains where we have now the broken and 

 mountainous country of Greece — plains which were probably united 

 with Asia Minor, spreading over the area where the deep Egean Sea 

 and its numerous islands are now situated. 



* Recherches sur le Climat et la Vegetation du Pays Tertiaire, par Oswald 

 Heer. 1851. 



