so abundant at Shepey; whilst the Murex pyrus, Murex longævus, Strombus amplus, &c. of the Hampshire cliff had never, perhaps, been enumerated among the Shepey fossils.
The identity of the stratum at Shepey and in Hampshire has, within a few years, been decided by digging into this same stratum at Kew, where several of the fossils, which had hitherto been supposed peculiar to Shepey, were found in the same pit with those which had been considered as peculiar to Hampshire.
In the present year, on cutting through a mound of this stratum which forms Highgate-hill, this identity has been still farther manifested by the discovery of great numbers of those fossils mingled together which had been generally distinguished into Hampshire and Shepey fossils; as crabs, nautili, &c. like those of Shepey, together with several shells which had been generally regarded as peculiar to Hampshire, and in particular that uncommon alated shell, Strombus amplus, Solander. (Rostellaria macroptera, Lamarck.)
In examining stratum, the curious fact that certain organic remains are peculiar to particular depositions, is first observed. Very few indeed of the fossils shells of the gravel strata are to be found in the bed of blue clay. In the gravel strata, by far the greater number of the shells bear a close agreement with those which now exist in not very distant seas; but in this clay stratum, “ very few of the shells are known to be natives of our own, or indeed any of the European shores, but the Br greater part of them, upon a comparison with the recent, are wholly unknown to us.”[1]
But although this clay stratum contains fossils of A much older date than those of the gravel stratum, it possesses other marks which agree with its position in shewing that it is of comparatively modern
- ↑ Fossilia hatoniensia, p. 5.
