The fossil testacea of the faluns of the Loire imply, according to the late Edward Forbes, that the beds were formed partly on the shore itself at the level of low water, and partly at very moderate depths, not exceeding ten fathoms below that level. The molluscan fauna is, on the whole, much more littoral than that of the Pliocene Red and Coralline Crag of Suffolk, and implies a shallower sea. It is, moreover, contrasted with the Suffolk Crag by the indications it affords of an extra-European climate. Thus it contains seven species of Cypræa, some larger than any existing cowry of the Mediterranean, several species of _Oliva, Ancillaria, Mitra, Terebra, Pyrula, Fasciolaria,_ and _ Conus._ Of the cones there are no less than eight species, some very large, whereas the only European cone now living is of diminutive size. The genus _Nerita,_ and many others, are also represented by individuals of a type now characteristic of equatorial seas, and wholly unlike any Mediterranean forms. These proofs of a more elevated temperature seem to imply the higher antiquity of the faluns as compared with the Suffolk Crag, and are in perfect accordance with the fact of the smaller proportion of testacea of recent species found in the faluns. Out of 290 species of shells, collected by myself in 1840 at Pontlevoy, Louans, Bossée, and other villages twenty miles south of Tours, and at Savigné, about fifteen miles north-west of that place, seventy-two only could be identified with recent species, which is in the proportion of twenty-five per cent. A large number of the 290 species are common to all the localities, those peculiar to each not being more numerous than we might expect to find in different bays of the same sea. The total number of species of testaceous mollusca from the faluns in my possession is 302, of which forty-five only, or fourteen per cent, were found by Mr. Wood to be common to the Suffolk Crag. The number of corals, including bryozoa and zoantharia, obtained by me at Doué and other localities before adverted to, amounts to forty-three, as determined by Mr. Lonsdale, of which seven (one of them a zoantharian) agree specifically with those of the Suffolk Crag. Some of the genera occurring fossil in Touraine, as the corals Astrea and _ Dendrophyllia_, and the bryozoan _Lunulites_, have not been found in European seas north of the Mediterranean; nevertheless, the zoantharia of the faluns do not seem to indicate, on the whole, so warm a climate as would be inferred from the shells.