496 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
very puzzling affair, if we suppose these remains contemporaneous with the drift 
gravel and elephant remains, 
I should suppose the drift gravel of the Trent valley was deposited when th 
waves of a tidal river (possibly reaching as far up as Burton-on-Trent) washed o 
the one side the Bunter Sandstone, on which stands Nottingham Castle, and on th 
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 wit 
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, Yienua, Proceedings, Yol. xliii. p. 217, 
Meeting, March 7, 1861.) 
(Translated by Count Mabschall.) 
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 timo 
ago, been gathering a store of materials for the history of the Yienna 
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 palseoutology, 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 
Yienna tertiaries into an Alpine and Extra- Alpine basin ; the state- 
ment of repeated ui)heavings, of coevality of the apparently different 
deposits of Nussdorf, Grund, Baden, &c. ; and lastly, the distinction of 
several successive Faimse of terrestrial mammalia. Since that time 
the means liberally afforded to me by His Majesty's Lord-Chamber- 
