The Marls and Clays of the Maltese Islands

Abstract

I. Introduction In the year 1843 the late Admiral Spratt published a brief notice on the above subject, and a few years afterwards the late Prof. Gulia and Capt. Hutton alluded to the Marls and Clays in their sketches of Maltese geology. The late Prof. Leith Adams published in 1870 a short account of them in his ‘Notes of a Naturalist,’ but the amount of information that he gives as to the nature of the beds and of their fossil contents is neither very extensive nor very exact. In 1874 the Islands were visited by Thos. Fuchs, of the Imperial Geological Museum of Vienna, and by him the first attempt was made to correlate the Maltese formations with those of Central Europe. In the first of the two pamphlets on the subject that he published he tells us that he was inclined to consider the Maltese Marls as being analogous to the ‘Badner Tegel’ of the Vienna Basin; but two years later, after having examined the marls of Bologna and compared their fossil contents with those of the Maltese beds, he changed his opinion and referred them to the Austrian Schlier. In 1889–90 Dr. John Murray, of Edinburgh, visited the Islands; and in the paper which was published on his return to Scotland he gave the first detailed account that had so far appeared of the nature and constitution of the Maltese rocks. His descriptions were, however, exclusively lithological; and, excepting the list of 122 species of foraminifera which is