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Following up this idea after he had visited Switzerland and without any communication with M. de Mortillet or cognisance of his views, he suggested in 1859 that the lake-basins were not of pre-glacial date, but had been scooped out by ice during the glacial period, the excavation having for the most part been effected in Miocene sandstone, provincially called, on account of its softness, "molasse."

There are important coal-beds in India of Permian age. There are coal-beds of Liassic age in South Hungary and in Texas, and of Jurassic age in Virginia, as well as at Brora in Sutherlandshire; there are coals of Cretaceous age in Moravia, and valuable Miocene Tertiary coals in Hungary and the Austrian Alps. Again, older than the true carboniferous age, are the Silurian anthracites of Co.

The total Miocene fauna comprises many genera and species of Catarrhine Apes, of Bats, of Insectivora; of Arctogaeal types of Rodentia; of Proboscidea; of equine, rhinocerotic, and tapirine quadrupeds; of cameline, bovine, antilopine, cervine, and traguline Ruminants; of Pigs and Hippopotamuses; of Viverridoe and Hyoenidoe among other Carnivora; with Edentata allied to the Aretogaeal Oryeteropus and Manis, and not to the Austro-Columbian Edentates.

The climate of North America, and of the land which still connected it with Europe, was correspondingly genial. * The great authority on Arctic geology, Heer, who makes this calculation, puts this flora in the Miocene. It is now usually considered that these warmer plants belong to the earlier part of the Tertiary era. Insects, birds, and mammals spread into vast and varied groups in every land.

The nearest affinity, and that a very close one, of the European E. meridionalis is with the Miocene E. planifrons of India; and of E. primigenius, with the existing India species.

In these beds a great number of the Lower Miocene plants of Switzerland have been discovered. We have already stated that the Upper Miocene formation is nowhere represented in the British Isles; but strata referable to the Lower Miocene period are found both in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

But there is a class of ancient marbles in Rome of much more recent geological origin belonging indeed to the Miocene epoch which are called Lumachella, from the Italian word signifying snail, on account of the presence in all the species of fossil shells. They vary in colour from the palest straw to the deepest purple.

Nothing very strange or unlike what is now living is found in the Pleistocene the latest deposits but when we go further back strange creatures are discovered, becoming stranger and less like living things as we pass through Pliocene to Miocene, and on downwards in layers, backwards in time to the Eocene.

They continued their studies, but without enthusiasm, being weary of eocene and miocene, of Mount Jurillo, of the Julia Island, of the mammoths of Siberia and of the fossils, invariably compared in all the authors to "medals which are authentic testimonies," so much so that one day Bouvard threw his knapsack on the ground, declaring that he would not go any farther. "Geology is too defective.

An older Miocene form, termed Mesohippus, has three toes in front, with a large splint-like rudiment representing the little finger; and three toes behind. The radius and ulna, the tibia and the fibula, are distinct, and the short crowned molar teeth are anchitherioid in pattern.