quoted at page 97 of this volume.) They occur also in the Chalk of Meudon, in the Jura Limestone of the Charente inférieure, and the Oolite of Calne. They have been found by the Marquis of Northampton in Chalk Hints from the neighbourhood of Brighton.
The Nummulite is the only Genus I shall select on the present occasion from this Order. It is included in M. D'Orbigny's Section Nautiloids.
Nummulites (Pl. 44, Fig. 6, 7,) are so called from their resemblance to a piece of money, they vary in size from that of a crown piece to microscopic littleness; and occupy an important place in the history of fossil shells, on account of the prodigious extent to which they are accumulated in the later members of the Secondary, and in many of the Tertiary strata. They are often piled on each other nearly in as close contact as the grains in a heap of corn. In this state they form a considerable portion of the entire bulk of many extensive mountains, e. g. in the Tertiary limestones of Verona and Monte Bolca, and in secondary strata of the Cretaceous formation in the Alps, Carpathians, and Pyrenees. Some of the pyramids and the Sphinx, of Egypt, are composed of limestone loaded with Nummulites.
It is impossible to see such mountain-masses of the remains of a single family of shells thus added to the solid materials of the globe, without recollecting that each individual shell once held an important place within the body of a living animal; and thus recalling our imagination to those distant epochs when the waters of the ocean which then covered Europe were filled with floating swarms of these extinct Mollusks, thick as the countless myriads of Beröe and Clio Borealis that now crowd the waters of the polar seas.[1]
- ↑ We have an analogy to this supposed state of crowded population of Nummulites in the ancient sea, in the marvellous fecundity of the northern ocean at the present time. It is stated by Cuvier, in his memoir
