ITALY. 
219 
Thus many miles of continuous deep sections of the old lacustrine 
deposits have been laid bare. Through the kindness of Dr. 
Kistori, who has made a special study of^ and lives in the middle 
of the district, I had an opportunity of examining the upper Yal 
d’Arno under his guidance. 
Though a large number of bones have been discovered in the 
lacustrine strata of the Val d’Arno, fossiliferous localities are 
not numerous, and shells and plants only occur in certain 
localities. To judge by the number of specimens in the various 
museums, scarcely so many bones have been found as in the 
Cromer Forest-bed, notwithstanding the enormously greater 
extent of the sections. In all probability the fauna is still only 
imperfectly known. 
The oldest Pliocene strata in the upper Val d’Arno, seem to be 
the lignite beds and associated leaf-beds, which outcrop at the 
margin of the basin near Castelnuovo and Gaville. The lignite 
is extensively mined, being about 100 feet thick. It was un¬ 
fortunately impossible to examine the mines so thoroughly as I 
could wish, for the lignite had caught fire a few days before my 
visit, and was still burning. However, the large open quarries 
showed excellent sections of the lignite as well as of the under¬ 
lying laminated blue clays, full of leaves. Some distance below 
these clays teeth of Tapir are found, but no other mammals 
have yet been discovered on this horizon. 
The plants of the lignite and associated clays of the Val d’Arno 
have recently been described by Dr. Ristori,'^ who records no 
less than 113 species, nearly all of them deciduous trees, ap¬ 
parently of extinct species. The number of forms no longer 
living, suggests that in the plant-beds we may have deposits 
somewhat older than the mammaliferous strata of the rest of the 
basin, though they are generally classed together. An enormous 
preponderance of extinct forms among the plants is scarcely what 
we shoidd expect in Newer Pliocene strata. 
The mammalia of the Val d’Arno are of great interest to the 
English geologist, for among them occur abundantly certain well- 
known species of the Forest-bed.f Elephas meridionalis, 
Rhinoceros etruscus, and Hippopotamus major are common in 
both districts and two of the deer and a horse are also found in 
both. The other species of the Val d’Arno mammals, such as 
the tapir and mastodons, perhaps point to a slightly older 
date, perhaps merely to a warmer climate. The general facies 
of the whole mammalian fauna is similar to that of the Forest- 
bed, except that the difference of latitude gives a more southern 
character to the assemblage, and allows two species of apes to 
appear. The Alps evidently formed no barrier to the migration 
of the Pliocene mammalia, and the narrow belt of low ground 
between the .Maritime Alps and the sea probably sufficed to 
* Atti Soc. Toscana Sci. Naturali, vol. vii., fasc. 1. (‘1885.) 
t C. J. Forsyth Major, On the Mammalian Fauna of the Val d’Arno. Quart. 
Journ. Geol, Soc.^ vol. xU., p. 1. (1885.) 
