496 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



very puzzling affair, if we suppose these remains contemporaneous with the drift 

 gravel and elephant remains. 



J should suppose the drift gravel of the Trent valley was deposited when the 

 waves of a tidal river (possibly reaching as far up as Burton -on -Trent) washed on 

 the one side the Bunter Sandstone, on which stands Nottingham Castle, and on the 

 other the steep slopes of " Clifton Grove," and the long ridge of Triassic hills ter- 

 minating at Red Hill, depositing the gravels found so abundantly on their northern 

 sides, but that certainly would be an age far, very far back in time, compared with 

 the age of the deposits at Muskham. 



Leicester, 15th Oct., 1861. James Plant. 



FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE. 



Abstract from 'Professor Suess's Paper 



ON THE LARGE CARNIYORA FOUND IN THE 

 AUSTRIAN TERTIARIES. 



(Imperial Academy of Sciences, Vienna. Proceedings, Yol. xliii. p. 217, 

 Meeting, March 7, 1861.) 



(Teanslated by Count Maesohall.) 



Many years before Darwin's celebrated theory came to light, the 

 question whether the repeated changes in animal and vegetable crea- 

 tion were the effects of changes in the external conditions of organic 

 life, had been discussed among many palaeontologists. 



The solution of this question having to be sought for only within 

 those deposits the Fauna of which is so nearly allied to that of 

 present times that we can hope for a rather clearer idea of the condi- 

 tion in which these extinct forms were living, I have, a long time 

 ago, been gathering a store of materials for the history of the Vienna 

 Tertiaries, intending, in obedience to Bacon's precept — " Non dispu- 

 tando adversarium, sed opere naturam vincere." 



I have now to treat this matter, — first, in its stratigraphical aspect, 

 describing the changes in external physical circumstances, then as a 

 question of palaeontology, inquiring into the action of those changes 

 on the organic being coeval with them. I have previously had occa- 

 sion to publish some result of my investigations in both these direc- 

 tions (see Acad. Proc. 1860, vol. xxxix. p. 158-166); and among 

 the most important of them I may number the separation of the 

 Vienna tertiaries into an Alpine and Extra- Alpine basin ; the state- 

 ment of repeated upheavings, of coevality of the apparently different 

 deposits of Nussdorf, Grund, Baden, &c. ; and lastly, the distinction of 

 several successive Faunae of terrestrial mammalia. Since that time 

 the means liberally afforded to me by His Majesty's Lord-Chamber- 



