No British strata have a distinct claim to be regarded as Upper Miocene, and as the Lower Miocene are also but feebly represented in the British Isles, we must refer to foreign examples in illustration of this important period in the earth’s history. The term “faluns” is given provincially by French agriculturists to shelly sand and marl spread over the land in Touraine, just as similar shelly deposits were formerly much used in Suffolk to fertilise the soil, before the coprolitic or phosphatic nodules came into use. Isolated masses of such faluns occur from near the mouth of the Loire, in the neighbourhood of Nantes, to as far inland as a district south of Tours. They are also found at Pontlevoy, on the Cher, about seventy miles above the junction of that river with the Loire, and thirty miles south-east of Tours. Deposits of the same age also appear under new mineral conditions near the towns of Dinan and Rennes, in Brittany. I have visited all the localities above enumerated, and found the beds on the Loire to consist principally of sand and marl, in which are shells and corals, some entire, some rolled, and others in minute fragments. In certain districts, as at Doué, in the Department of Maine and Loire, ten miles south-west of Saumur, they form a soft building-stone, chiefly composed of an aggregate of broken shells, bryozoa, corals, and echinoderms, united by a calcareous cement; the whole mass being very like the Coralline Crag near Aldborough, and Sudbourn in Suffolk. The scattered patches of faluns are of slight thickness, rarely exceeding fifty feet; and between the district called Sologne and the sea they repose on a great variety of older rocks; being seen to rest successively upon gneiss, clay-slate, various secondary formations, including the chalk; and, lastly, upon the upper fresh-water limestone of the Parisian tertiary series, which, as before mentioned (p. 142), stretches continuously from the basin of the Seine to that of the Loire. Fig. 136: Dinotherium giganteum. At some points, as at Louans, south of Tours, the shells are stained of a ferruginous colour, not unlike that of the Red Crag of Suffolk. The species are, for the most part, marine, but a few of them belong to land and fluviatile genera. Among the former, _ Helix turonensis)_ (Fig. 38) is the most abundant. Remains of terrestrial quadrupeds are here and there intermixed, belonging to the genera Dinotherium (Fig. 136), Mastodon, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Chæropotamus, Dichobune, Deer, and others, and these are accompanied by cetacea, such as the Lamantin, Morse, Sea-calf, and Dolphin, all of extinct species.