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Updated: June 22, 2025
Imperfection of the Record. Calcaire Silicieux. Gres de Beauchamp. Calcaire Grossier. Miliolite Limestone. Soissonnais Sands. Lower Eocene of France. Nummulitic Formations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Eocene Strata in the United States. Gigantic Cetacean. Map of the principal Eocene areas of North-western Europe, showing: Shaded dotted: Hypogene rocks and strata older than the Devonian.
In June the mean of the barometer readings at the bungalow was absolutely identical with that of the Calcutta barometer, In September it was 0.016 inch lower, and in November 0.066 lower. The mean annual temperature throughout the Jheels is less than 2 degrees below that of Calcutta. The rock at Terrya is a nummulitic limestone, worn into extensive caverns.
South of the main axis of this metamorphic and volcanic mass are to be found strata of two well defined series: the cretaceous, and nummulitic. The cretaceous contains several important coalfields. The nummulitic series, which overlies the cretaceous, attains a thickness of 900 feet in the Theria river, consisting of alternating strata of compact limestones and sandstones.
The Eocene nummulitic limestone of Egypt is a rock mainly composed, like the more ancient white chalk, of globigerine mud; and if the reader will refer to what we have said of the extent to which the nummulitic marine strata, formed originally at the bottom of the sea, now enter into the framework of mountain chains of the principal continents, he will at once perceive that the present Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans are geographical terms, which must be wholly without meaning when applied to the Eocene, and still more to the Cretaceous Period; so that to talk of the chalk having been uninterruptedly forming in the Atlantic from the Cretaceous Period to our own, is as inadmissible in a geographical as in a geological sense.
When we have once arrived at the conviction that the nummulitic formation occupies a middle and upper place in the Eocene series, we are struck with the comparatively modern date to which some of the greatest revolutions in the physical geography of Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa must be referred.
Some time during the Miocene epoch, possibly when the Himalayan chain was elevated, the bottom of the nummulitic sea was upheaved and converted into dry land, in the direction of a line extending from Abyssinia to the mouth of the Ganges. By this means, the Dekhan on the one hand, and South Africa on the other, became connected with the Miocene dry land and with one another.
The enduring pyramids themselves are formed of the nummulitic limestone studded with its "Pharaoh's beans," the exuviæ of shell-fish that perished ages before the Nile had created Egypt. Of the breccias there is a great variety among the relics of ancient Rome. A breccia is a rock made up of angular pebbles or fragments of other rocks.
The pyramids were nearly all made of nummulitic limestone composed of the remains of organic life; a material which belonged to the latest geologic ages, when whole generations and different platforms of life had come and gone.
All the mountain-chains, such as the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Himalayas, into the composition of whose central and loftiest parts the nummulitic strata enter bodily, could have had no existence till after the Middle Eocene period. During that period the sea prevailed where these chains now rise, for nummulites and their accompanying testacea were unquestionably inhabitants of salt water.
The nummulitic limestone of the Swiss Alps rises to more than 10,000 feet above the level of the sea, and attains here and in other mountain chains a thickness of several thousand feet. It may be said to play a far more conspicuous part than any other tertiary group in the solid framework of the earth's crust, whether in Europe, Asia, or Africa.
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