M. Prevost has therefore suggested that a river may have swept away the bodies of animals, and the plants which lived on its borders, or in the lakes which it traversed, and may have carried them down into the centre of the gulf into which flowed the waters impregnated with sulphate of lime. We know that the Fiume Salso in Sicily enters the sea so charged with various salts that the thirsty cattle refuse to drink of it. A stream of sulphureous water, as white as milk, descends into the sea from the volcanic mountain of Idienne on the east of Java; and a great body of hot water, charged with sulphuric acid, rushed down from the same volcano on one occasion, and inundated a large tract of country, destroying, by its noxious properties, all the vegetation.[191-A] In like manner the Pusanibio, or "Vinegar River," of Colombia, which rises at the foot of Purace, an extinct volcano, 7,500 feet above the level of the sea, is strongly impregnated with sulphuric and muriatic acids and with oxide of iron. We may easily suppose the waters of such streams to have properties noxious to marine animals, and in this manner the entire absence of marine remains in the ossiferous gypsum may be explained.[191-B] There are no pebbles or coarse sand in the gypsum; a circumstance which agrees well with the hypothesis that these beds were precipitated from water holding sulphate of lime in solution, and floating the remains of different animals. In this formation the relics of about fifty species of quadrupeds, including the genera _Paleotherium_, _Anoplotherium_, and others, have been found, all extinct, and nearly four-fifths of them belonging to a division of the order _Pachydermata_, which is now represented by only four living species; namely three tapirs and the daman of the Cape. With them a few carnivorous animals are associated, among which are a species of fox and gennet. Of the _Rodentia_, a dormouse and a squirrel; of the _Insectivora_, a bat; and of the _Marsupialia_ (an order now confined to America, Australia, and some contiguous islands), an opossum, have been discovered. Of birds, about ten species have been ascertained, the skeletons of some of which are entire. None of them are referable to existing species.[192-A] The same remark applies to the fish, according to MM. Cuvier, and Agassiz, as also to the reptiles. Among the last are crocodiles and tortoises of the genera _Emys_ and _Trionyx_. The tribe of land quadrupeds most abundant in this formation is such as now inhabits alluvial plains and marshes, and the banks of rivers and lakes, a class most exposed to suffer by river inundations. Whether the disproportion of carnivorous animals can be ascribed to this cause, or whether they were comparatively small in number and dimensions, as in the indigenous fauna of Australia, when first known to Europeans, is a point on which it would be rash, perhaps, to offer an opinion in the present state of our knowledge.