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If we pass to the American continent, we find in the State of New Jersey a series of sandy and argillaceous beds wholly unlike in mineral character to our Upper Cretaceous system; which we can, nevertheless, recognise as referable, palaeontologically, to the same division. That they were about the same age generally as the European chalk and Neocomian, was the conclusion to which Dr.

The nearest living Proteaceae now feel the in Abyssinia in latitude 20 degrees N., but the greatest number are confined to the Cape and Australia. All geologists agree that the distribution of the Cretaceous land and sea had scarcely any connection with the present geography of the globe. Glyptostrobus Europaeus.

On the same chronological scale the interval between the Permian and Cretaceous revolutions was only about seven million years, and the Tertiary Era will comprise only about three million years.

Furthermore, when we examine the rocks of the Cretaceous epoch, we find the remains of some animals which the closest scrutiny cannot show to be, in any important respect, different from those which live at the present time. Such is the case with the Globigerinæ, the skeletons of which, aggregated together, form a large proportion of our English chalk.

The opinion of many observers, that the Nummulitic formation belongs partly to the cretaceous era, seems chiefly to have arisen from confounding an allied genus, Orbitoides, with the true Nummulite.

As the Upper Cretaceous rocks of Europe are, for the most part, of purely marine origin, and formed in deep water usually far from the nearest shore, land-plants of this period, as we might naturally have anticipated, are very rarely met with.

There are families of fishes whose type of construction has persisted all the way from the carboniferous strata right up to the cretaceous; and others which have lasted through almost the whole range of the secondary rocks, and from the lias to the older tertiaries.

Between Poitiers and La Rochelle, the space marked A on the map separates two regions of chalk. This space is occupied by the Oolite and certain other formations older than the Chalk and Neocomian, and has been supposed by M. E. de Beaumont to have formed an island in the Cretaceous sea. Cretacee du S.-O. de la France Mem. de la Soc. Radiolites radiosa, d'Orbigny. White chalk of France. b.

It is formed mainly of the same cretaceous limestone as the other mountains of these parts, and like them has a rounded summit; but rocks of igneous origin enter into its geological structure; and in its vegetation it more resembles the mountain ranges of Taurus and Amanus than those of southern Syria and Palestine.

At any rate these gigantic animals rapidly ceased to be, so that by the middle of the Cretaceous period they were almost all gone, except those that inhabited the sea; and at the end of this time they had shrunk to lizards in size.