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LETTER XX. 
FOSSIL CROCODILES TWO SPECIES FOUND IN FRANCE, DIFFERING 
FROM ANY KNOWN SPECIES FOSSIL SPECIES FOUND ALSO IN 
ENGLAND. 
T he fossils which we shall now examine will, I doubt not, excite in 
you a considerable degree of interest ; since they have been found in 
such a state, and in such numbers, as to allow of their comparison 
with the correspondent parts of animals of the same genus ; and since 
they have been thus compared by M. Cuvier. 
These fossils were collected in the neighbourhood of Honfleur, by 
the Abbe Bachelet, an assiduous naturalist at Rouen, and were sent , 
by 07 'ders of the Prcefect of the department, to the Museum of Natural 
History ! Similar fossils are also obtained at Havre. They were 
found in a bed of hard limestone, of a bluish grey colour, which be- 
comes nearly black when wet, and which is found along the shore on 
both sides of the mouth of the Seine, being in some places covered 
by the sea, and in others above its level, even at high water. 
This bed, M. Cuvier observes, is certainly more ancient than the 
immense mass of clay which rests on it, and which rises in cliffs of 
300 or 400 feet in height, forming the whole of Caux, a part of Auge, 
and spreads into Picardy and Champagne, and even into England. 
These bones of crocodiles, as well as those of lizards, in Thuringia, 
belong, then, to strata considerably anterior to those which contain 
