The lias formation is largely developed along the northern, eastern, and south-western side of the chain, forming an immense belt from near the foot of the Jungfrau, in the central district of Switzerland, to Savona in the Gulf of Genoa. The oolitic formation succeeds, on a scale of still greater magnitude, having a continuous stretch from the Mediterranean at Toulon to Vienna, on the Danube; again constituting an enormous deposit along the Jura range of mountains; and then by Ulm, Altmuhl, and Amberg, to Beyruth, with its celebrated bone caves, in the heart of Germany. The Oxfordian group are represented by the “Neocomian” limestones, a series of hard subcrystalline strata, abounding in fossils of the gault and upper green-sand. To these succeed beds of red, gray, and white marly limestones, containing _Gryphææ_, _Inocerami_, and _Ananchytes_, and regarded as the equivalents, as they are undoubtedly in the position, of the white chalks of England. A supercretaceous group, consisting of nummulitic and shelly rocks, the “flysch” of the Swiss, constitutes the close of the secondary, and graduates conformably and insensibly upward, by mineral and zoological passages, into the eocene system. The vast beds of strata, which are termed the “molasse” and “nagelflue,” contain in the _lower_ series a large proportion of living species of marine shells, while the associated and _overlaying_ strata of terrestrial origin are loaded with forms all of which are extinct. In this group there is nevertheless shadowed forth a type of rocks characteristic both of a miocene and pleiocene age; but so anomalous is their arrangement, that the younger are often found to dip under the older rocks out of which they have been formed. And as of these, so generally of the entire Alpine series now referred to, the position of the various groups in particular localities can only be unraveled in their flexures, dislocations, and displacements, by means of the organic remains with which they severally abound.