On the banks of the James River, in Virginia, about 20 miles below Richmond, in a cliff about 30 feet high, I observed yellow and white sands overlying an Eocene marl, just as the yellow sands of the crag lie on the blue London clay in Suffolk and Essex in England. In the Virginian sands, we find a profusion of an Astarte (_A. undulata_, Conrad), which resembles closely, and may possibly be a variety of, one of the commonest fossils of the Suffolk crag (_A. bipartita_); the other shells also, of the genera _Natica_, _Fissurella_, _Artemis_, _Lucina_, _Chama_, _Pectunculus_, and _Pecten_, are analogous to shells both of the English crag and French faluns, although the species are almost all distinct. Out of 147 of these American fossils I could only find 13 species common to Europe, and these occur partly in the Suffolk crag, and partly in the faluns of Touraine; but it is an important characteristic of the American group, that it not only contains many peculiar extinct forms, such as _Fusus quadricostatus_, Say (see fig. 152.), and _Venus tridacnoides_, abundant in these same formations, but also some shells which, like _Fulgur carica_ of Say, and _F. canaliculatus_ (see fig. 151.), _Calyptraea costata_, _Venus mercenaria_, Lam., _Modiola glandula_, Totten, and _Pecten magellanicus_, Lam., are recent species, yet of forms now confined to the western side of the Atlantic, a fact implying that the beginning of the present geographical distribution of mollusca dates back to a period as remote as that of the Miocene strata. Of ten species of zoophytes which I procured on the banks of the James River, two were identical with species of the Faluns of Touraine. With respect to climate, Mr. Lonsdale regards these corals as indicating a temperature exceeding that of the Mediterranean, and the shells would lead to similar conclusions. Those occurring on the James River are in the 37th degree of N. latitude, while the French faluns are in the 47th; yet the forms of the American fossils would scarcely imply so warm a climate as must have prevailed in France, when the Miocene strata of Touraine originated. Among the remains of fish in these Post-Eocene strata of the United States are several large teeth of the shark family, not distinguishable specifically from fossils of the faluns of Touraine, and the Maltese tertiaries.