OF WESTERN EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN COASTS. 931 
cutting was composed of angular stones, not waterworn. Loose at the surface, it 
soon became more or less mature breccia, for the most part so hard that it was 
blasted with gunpowder. In this breccia and at various depths, some of more than 
30 feet, the author has taken out teeth of the Bear [Ursus spelmus), and of the 
Hyaena [Hycena spelcBci), while with and below those teeth, he found flints worked 
by man.” Bones and teeth of other various animals also occur, which Mr. G. Busk 
pronounced to be almost identical with those found in the Gibraltar caves. The 
analogy between these breccias of the south of France and the “ head ” and rubble- 
drift of the coasts of the English Channel is unmistakable, 
[This slope of angular rubble was also noticed by M. E. Riviere,'"' who states that 
in 1870, when the railway was being carried in front of the caves of Baussi-Raussi, 
near Mentone, he found in the debris thrown out of the cutting “ a number of bones 
—some entire and others broken—worked flints and flakes, shells, &c., the whole 
more or less cemented and forming a hard breccia with angular pieces of the adjacent 
rocks, and here and there carbonaceous matter.” The specimens, however, are not 
specified.—J. P., April, 1893.] 
The Sub-fossil Wood of Dixmont. —Near Villeneuve-sur-rYonne, between Sens 
and Auxerre, is a very curious deposit of which we have yet but a very insufficient 
description. I visited it some years ago, but too hurriedly to add much to the 
account of M, Forestier.! That gentleman termed it a subterranean forest. It is a 
clotted mass of stems and branches of coniferous wood, mostly fir trees, with some 
chestnuts, piled together in the utmost confusion, but in the jiart we saw, not 
compressed much more than an ordinary wood-stack, and the interstices not filled in. 
The river is at some little distance, but it is not apparently connected with it, and the 
district is flat. This heap of wood rises some 10 to 20 feet above the surface of the 
ground, and is said to be nearly 200 feet (60 metres) thick, with a length of about 
3 miles (4 to 5 kilometres). It is oveidaid by a bed of loam or sand, and under it is 
a bed of gravel. The lower part is said to pass into the state of lignite, whilst in the 
upper part, the wood, which has acquired the black colour of ordinary bog-wood, is 
so well preserved that it can be worked like ordinary wood. No organic remains of 
any sort have been found either in the overlying drift or amongst the wood. The 
mass seems to lie in a depression on the surface and not to be connected with a 
river deposit. The branches are broken into small fragments. Whether it can be 
connected with the rubble-drift is only a suggestion I venture to make. It 
resembles no ordinary deposit, and it has occurred to me that it might possibly be, 
like the land shells and Mammalian remains elsewhere, a portion of the wash of the old 
land surface. 
* ‘ Paleontologie,’ “ De I’Antiquite de THomme dans les Alpes Maritimes,” p. 12, Paris, 1887. 
t ‘Bull. Soc. Geol. de France,’ 2nd ser., vol. 7, p. 388, 1850. 
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