plants, below which are marls of a blue indigo colour. In the lower quarry eleven beds are mentioned, in which, as in the upper, both land and fresh-water plants and many insects occur. In the 6th, reckoning from the top, many plants have been obtained, such as _Liquidambar, Daphnogene, Podogonium,_ and _ Ulmus_, together with tortoises, besides the bones and teeth of a ruminant quadruped, named by H. von Meyer _Palæomeryx eminens._ No. 9 is called the insect-bed, a layer only a few inches thick, which, when exposed to the frost, splits into leaves as thin as paper. In these thin laminæ plants such as _ Liquidambar, Daphnogene,_ and _Glyptostrobus_, occur, with innumerable insects in a wonderful state of preservation, usually found singly. Below this is an indigo-blue marl, like that at the bottom of the higher quarry, resting on yellow marl ascertained to be at least thirty feet thick. Fig. 138: Cinnamomum polymorphum. All the above fossil-bearing strata were evidently formed with extreme slowness. Although the fossiliferous beds are, in the aggregate, no more than a few yards in thickness, and have only been examined in the small area comprised in the two quarries just alluded to, they give us an insight into the state of animal and vegetable life in part of the Upper Miocene period, such as no other region in the world has elsewhere supplied. In the year 1859, Professor Heer had already determined no less than 475 species of plants and more than 800 insects from these Œningen beds. He supposes that a river entering a lake floated into it some of the leaves and land insects, together with the carcasses of quadrupeds, among others a great Mastodon. Occasionally, during tempests, twigs and even boughs of trees with their leaves were torn off and carried for some distance so as to reach the lake. Springs, containing carbonate of lime, seem at some points to have supplied calcareous matter in solution, giving origin locally to a kind of travertin, in which organic bodies sinking to the bottom became hermetically sealed up. The laminæ, says Heer, which immediately succeed each other were not all formed at the same season, for it can be shown that, when some of them originated, certain plants were in flower, whereas, when the next of these layers was produced, the same plants had ripened their fruit. This inference is confirmed by independent proofs derived from insects. The principal insect-bed is rarely two inches thick, and is composed, says Heer, of about 250 leaf-like laminæ, some of which were deposited in the spring, when the _Cinnamomum polymorphum_ (Fig. 138) was in flower, others in summer, when winged ants were numerous, and when the poplar and willow had matured their seed; others, again, in autumn, when the same _ Cinnamomum polymorphum_ (Fig. 138) was in fruit, as well as the liquidambar, oak, clematis, and many other plants. The ancient lake seems to have had a belt of poplars and willows round its borders,