It would be a purely gratuitous assumption to say that the inclined cretaceous strata (_b_, fig. 11) on the flanks of the Pyrenees, were the very last which were deposited during the Cretaceous period, or that, as soon as they were upheaved, all or nearly all the species of animals and plants now found fossil in them were suddenly exterminated; yet, unless this can be affirmed, we cannot say that the Pyrenees were not upheaved during the Cretaceous period. Consequently, another range of mountains, at the base of which cretaceous rocks may lie in horizontal stratification, may have been elevated, like the chain A, fig. 12, during some part of the same great period. There are mountains in Sicily two or three thousand feet high, the tops of which are composed of limestone, in which a large proportion of the fossil shells agree specifically with those now inhabiting the Mediterranean. Here, as in many other countries, the deposits now in progress in the sea must inclose shells and other fossils specifically identical with those of the rocks constituting the contiguous land. So there are islands in the Pacific where a mass of dead coral has emerged to a considerable altitude, while other portions of the mass remain beneath the sea, still increasing by the growth of living zoophytes and shells. The chalk of the Pyrenees, therefore, may at a remote period have been raised to an elevation of several thousand feet, while the species found fossil in the same chalk still continued to be represented in the fauna of the neighboring ocean. In a word, we cannot assume that the origin of a new range of mountains caused the Cretaceous period to cease, and served as the prelude to a new order of things in the animate creation.