Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/195

Rh greater than those which are already known to have taken place within the human period on the borders of the Mediterranean, of which I shall now proceed to cite a well-authenticated example, observed in Sardinia.

Count Albert de la Marmora, in his description of the geology of Sardinia, has shown that on the southern coast of that island, at Cagliari and in the neighbourhood, an ancient bed of the sea, containing marine shells of living species, and numerous fragments of antique pottery, has been elevated to the height of from seventy to ninety-eight metres above the present level of the Mediterranean. Oysters and other shells, of which a careful list has been published, including the common mussel (Mytilus edulis), many of them having both valves united, occur, embedded in a breccia in which fragments of limestone abound. The mussels are often in such numbers as to impart, when they have decomposed, a violet colour to the marine stratum. Besides pieces of coarse pottery, a flattened ball of baked earthenware, with a hole through its axis, was found in the midst of the marine shells. It is supposed to have been used for weighting a fishing net. Of this and of one of the fragments of ancient pottery Count de la Marmora has given figures.

The upraised bed of the sea probably belongs in this instance to the post-pliocene period, for in a bone breccia, filling fissures in the rocks around Cagliari, the remains of extinct mammalia have been detected; among which is a new genus of carnivorous quadruped, named Cynotherium by M. Studiati, and figured by Count de la Marmora in his Atlas (pl. vii.), also an extinct species of Lagomys, determined by Cuvier in 1825