304 
ARALO- CASPIAN DEPOSITS FORMED IN ONE GREAT SEA. 
thrown up and exposed in succession. Here then we presume the elevation of sub- 
marine beds into land, produced one of those natural barriers, by which the Western 
Ocean of that day was eventually shut out from all communication with the great 
internal Aralo-Caspian ; and here, therefore, we might expect to detect the remains 
of such animals as the herbivorous cetacean, associated with sea shells and fol- 
lowed by the inhabitants of brackish water. In such a conterminous tract, where 
the waters must have undergone a gradual change, a few hardy marine animals 
might have lived on for a time ; and thus can be explained the existence of coral 
reefs, composed entirely of the Eschara lapidosa (Pallas), which there seem to rise 
up through the brackish water strata. But with a further separation from their 
original seat, the oceanic types would necessarily dwindle away, and when the 
isolation of the Aralo-Caspian Mediterranean was completed, the result would be 
a simplification of the animals which lived in it, and the establishment within it of 
a fauna perfectly distinct from that of the ocean. This view is, indeed, strongly 
sustained by an appeal to facts. Partial intermixtures of shells, or rather such 
transitions as that at Taman, and of which we believe there are also evidences 
(though of a much less decisive nature) in Bessarabia, and around the Sea of Azof 
and the Black Sea, are peculiar to the western boundaries of the Aralo-Caspian 
deposits. In following these strata to the east no such phsenomena have been 
detected, and the central portions of this widely-spread formation, around the 
Caspian Sea, present exclusively the true and persistent types of an inland sea, 
the beds of which were formed under widely extended and uniform conditions, 
and in which there are no vestiges of corals, marine shells or herbivorous ceta- 
ceans. The great uniformity of composition and fossil contents which pertain to 
these Aralo-Caspian rocks over such enormous eastern regions, a point on which 
we shall presently dilate, compels us therefore to differ from M. Huot in the theory 
of their origin ; for whilst he attributes them to the desiccation of numerous shal- 
low brackish lakes or lagoons, left here and there by the retirement of the ocean, 
we, on the contrary, are convinced that all the Aralo-Caspian deposits were accu- 
mulated under one vast inland sea, the inhabitants of which differed as essentially 
from those of the ocean of that day, as the animals of New Holland now differ 
from those of the rest of the world. 
Before we quit the consideration of the uppermost deposits of the Crimsea, 
Kertch and Taman, we cannot avoid alluding to anothei opinion expressed by M. 
Huot, from which we still more strongly dissent, viz. the presence of great fossil 
extinct Mammalia ( Elephas primigenius and Mastodon angustidens ) in his middle 
