We are told by Sir Archibald Geikie (p. 851) that "from the Pyrenees eastwards, through the Alps and Apennines into Greece, and the southern side of the Mediterranean basin, through the Carpathian Mountains and the Balkan into Asia Minor, and thence through Persia and the heart of Asia to the shores of China and Japan, a series of massive limestones has been traced, which, from the abundance of their characteristic foraminifera, have been called the Nummulitic Limestone. Unlike the thin, soft, modern-looking, undisturbed beds of the Anglo-Parisian area, these limestones attain a depth of sometimes several thousand feet of hard, compact, sometimes crystalline rock, passing even into marble, and they have been folded and fractured on such a colossal scale that their strata have been heaved up into lofty mountain crests sometimes 10,000, and in the Himalaya range more than 16,000 feet above the sea." "Nowhere in Europe," continues the same author (p. 860), "do oligocene strata play so important a part in the scenery of the land, or present on the whole so interesting and full a picture of the state of Europe when they were deposited, as in Switzerland. Rising into massive mountains, as in the well-known Rigi and Rossberg, they attain a thickness of more than 6000 feet." "By far the larger portion of these strata is of lacustrine origin. They must have been formed in a large lake, the area of which probably underwent gradual subsidence during the period of deposition, until in Miocene times the sea once more overflowed the area."