some of them were obtained on the crest of a pass, seventeen thousand feet above the level of the sea.  Here were also found fragments of rock, bearing impressions of shells, detached from the contiguous peak rising far above the elevated level:  generally, however, it would appear, that the rocks from whence these shells were collected, rise to an altitude of about sixteen thousand feet; one cliff was no less than a mile in perpendicular height above the nearest level.  M. Gerard continues, ’Just before crossing the boundary of Sudak into Bassalier, I was exceedingly gratified by the discovery of a bed of fossil oysters clinging to the rock as if they had been alive.’  No doubt many of the rocks are in more sublime relief now, than they were in the antediluvian world.  The subsidence of the land and lower levels, and the action of submarine currents would scoop out deep valleys; and no doubt, much that is now ‘dry land,’ once formed the bed of the ocean.  Alpine structures have emerged from the deep, and volcanoes have heaped up elevations on mountains already lofty and sublime; as Cotopaxi, Antisana, and Tunguragua, amid the range of the Cordilleras of the Andes.  The Geological Society has a series of ammonites from India.  These fossils are objects of adoration to the Hindoos:  they fall on the S.W. side of the Himala mountains from an altitude which exceeds that of perpetual congelation:  they are picked up by the natives, and religiously preserved, being concealed as much as possible from the scrutiny of Europeans.  Mont Perdu, among the Appennines, which rise to an altitude of eleven thousand feet above the sea’s level, encloses an innumerable multitude of testacea:  and Humboldt found sea-shells among the Andes, fourteen thousand feet above the level of the ocean.  At Touraine, on the Continent, is a bed of shells which extends nearly twenty-seven miles, having a depth of twenty feet.  Mount Bolca contains upwards of one hundred species of fish from the four quarters of the earth, and collected together in one immense assemblage.”

(To be continued.)

* * * * *

THE NATURALIST.

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NOTES UPON NOTES.

We abridge the following from a few Horticultural Notes on a Journey from Rome to Naples, in March last, contributed to that excellent work, the Gardeners’ Magazine, by W. Spence, Esq.  F.L.S.

Italian Inn.—­Mr. Spence says, “Our rooms at the inn at Capua, where we slept, opened on a terraced garden, with orange trees, vines trained on arched trellises, marble fountains, &c., which, for ten shillings expense, might have been made very gay and attractive; but all was forlornness and disorder, the beds untrimmed, and the walks littered with dirt.  Two magnificent plants of Opuntia vulgaris, which flanked one of the windows, the waiter said, were planted there ‘per pompa’ (for pomp’s sake); a motive, unfortunately, so often the leading one in Italy, without any regard to the humbler ones of neatness and order.”