870 STRATIGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY. [Book VI. 
Section IV.—Pliocene. 
§ 1. General Characters. 
The tendency towards local and variable development which is 
increasingly observable as we ascend through the series of Tertiary 
deposits reaches its culmination in those to which the name of 
Pliocene has been given. The only European area in which Pliocene 
strata attain any considerable dimensions as rock-masses is in the 
basin of the Mediterranean, especially along both sides of the 
Apennine chain and in Sicily. In that region, reaching a thickness 
of several thousand feet, they were accumulated during a slow de- 
pression of the sea-bottom, and their growth was brought to an end - 
by the subterranean movements which culminated in the outbreak 
of Etna, Vesuvius, and the other late Tertiary Italian volcanoes, and 

Fic. 416.—PLioceng PLants. 
a, Glyptostrobus Europeus (Brongn.) (4); b, Hakea exalata (Heer). 
in the uprise of the land between the base of the Apennines and the 
sea on either side of the peninsula. Elsewhere the marine Pliocene 
beds of Hurope, local in extent and variable in character, reveal the 
beds of shallow seas, the elevation of which into land completed the 
outlines of the Continent at the close of Tertiary time. Here and 
there in south-eastern Hurope evidence exists of the gradual isolation 
of portions of the sea into basins somewhat like those of the Aralo- 
Caspian depression, with a brackish or less purely marine fauna. In 
some portions of these basins, however, as in the Karabhogas Bay of 
the existing Caspian Sea, such concentration of the water took place 
as to give rise to extensive accumulations of salt and gypsum. Ina 
few localities fluviatile and lacustrine deposits of the Pliocene period 
F tee 
thot wee 
