It appears,
notwithstanding, from the researches of M. Constant Prevost, that some of the
minor alternations and intermixtures of fresh-water and marine deposits, in the
Paris basin, may be accounted for without such changes of level, by imagining
both to have been simultaneously in progress, in the same bay of the same sea,
or a gulf into which many rivers entered.
GYPSEOUS SERIES OF MONTMARTRE (A.1, TABLE 16.1).
To enlarge on the numerous subdivisions of the Parisian strata would lead me
beyond my present limits; I shall therefore give some examples only of the most
important formations. Beneath the Gres de Fontainebleau, belonging to the Lower
Miocene period, as before stated, we find, in the neighbourhood of Paris, a
series of white and green marls, with subordinate beds of gypsum. These are most
largely developed in the central parts of the Paris basin, and, among other
places, in the hill of Montmartre, where its fossils were first studied by
Cuvier.
The gypsum quarried there for the manufacture of plaster of Paris occurs as a
granular crystalline rock, and, together with the associated marls, contains
land and fluviatile shells, together with the bones and skeletons of birds and
quadrupeds.
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