OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 315 



Four Iiiinclred and twenty-nintli meeting. 



August 13, 1856. — Stated Meeting. 



The President in the chair. 



Professor Tread well, from the committee on the subject of 

 meteorological observations, reported, that Mr. Hall's observa- 

 tions are in due process of preparation for the press. 



Professor W. B. Rogers made the following communica- 

 tion : — 



" Proofs of the Protozoic Age of some of the Altered Rocks of 

 £! astern Massachusetts, from Fossils recently discovered. 



" It is well known that the altered slates and gritty rocks which 

 show themselves interruptedly throughout a good part of Eastern 

 Massachusetts, have, with the exception of the coal-measures on the 

 confines of this State and Rhode Island, failed hitherto to furnish geol- 

 ogists any fossil evidences of a paleozoic age, although from aspect 

 and position they have been conjecturally classed with the system of 

 rocks belonging to this period. Indeed, the metamorphic condition of 

 these beds generally, traceable no doubt to the sienitic and other 

 igneous masses by which they are traversed or enclosed, would natu- 

 rally forbid the expectation of finding in them any distinguishable 

 fossil forms. 



"Lately, through the kindness of Peter Wainwright, Esq., residing 

 in the neighborhood, I have been led to examine a quarry in the belt 

 of siliceous and argillaceous slate which lies on the boundary of 

 Quincy and Braintree, about ten miles south of Boston, and, to my 

 great surprise and delight, I found it to be a locality of trilohites. 



" It appears that for several years past the owner of the quarry, 

 Mr. E. Hayward, and his family, have been aware of the existence of 

 these so-called images in the rock, which from time to time they have 

 quarried as a ballasting-material for wharves ; but until now the lo- 

 cality has remained entirely unknoivn to science. 



" The fossils are in the form of casts, some of them of great size, 

 and lying at various levels in the strata. So far as I have yet ex- 

 plored the quarry, they belong chiefly, if not altogether, to one Spe- 

 cies, which, on the authority of Professor Agassiz, as well as my own 

 comparison with Barrande's descriptions and figures, is a species of 

 Paradoxides. Of its specific afiinities I will not now speak, further 



