Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 35.djvu/619

Rh to discover Terebratula ampulla, T. minor, and Terebratulina caput-serpentis." He moreover, in consequence of his failure to discover these species, supposes, as they are plentiful in the Pliocene of Sicily, that certain specimens described by Davidson were imported from that island and incorporated with the Maltese Miocene.

With reference to the Pectens above mentioned, whilst I admit the possibility of confounding the broken and scarcely, at the best, entire specimens from the Lower Limestone with T. spinulosus and T. costatus, so plentiful in the red or coralline bed of the Upper Limestone, I must aver, so far as the Brachiopoda and Echinodermata, whose distributions have just been detailed, are concerned, I see no reason whatever to retract any thing that I have stated, or in the observations made by me in the papers on these two groups, so ably described by my distinguished friends, Dr. Wright, F.R.S., F.G.S., and Mr. Davidson, F.R.S. At the same time I quite agree with the latter that the so-called "Maltese" Waldheimia Garibaldiana has assuredly no claims to be so considered; and I can suggest the probable cause of M. Fuchs's bad fortune in not finding fossils in the Maltese beds where his predecessors assert they are common, by the circumstance that as the majority of the specimens are obtained from cliff and horizontal sections, where the rock decomposing leaves the fossil prominently exposed, it so happened that during a period of nearly six years I was almost constantly engaged with others in making collections wherever the nature of the ground would permit a sound footing; so that many exposures, once extremely prolific of fossils, became absolutely denuded of every vestige of animal remains recognizable, at all events, to the naked eye.

Consequent on the apparent discrepancies between the uppermost and lowermost beds, M. Fuchs, in his able and interesting paper just referred to, divides the Maltese beds into two groups, which he considers are "palæontologically most sharply separated from one another, and have only a very few fossils in common"—a statement true in some degree, but certainly not to the extent he imagines; nor is it so pronounced as, in my opinion, to warrant the removal of the uppermost beds from the other formations.

I shall now proceed to the consideration of the vertebrate fauna of the formations.

(Plate XXV. figs. 5, 5 a.)

The specimens by which the presence of remains of Mastodon in the lower beds of the Miocene formations of the Island of Gozo is established, comprehend two imperfect molars. Fig. 5 retains only