J. S. NEWBERRY — THE LARAMIE GROUP. 531 



I have one fact of my own observations which may be worth stating and which 

 may not be known to all. About 15 miles above the town of Glendive, on the right 

 bank of the lower Yellowstone river, there is a cliff, known as Iron bluff, which is 

 colored very bright red from having the carbonaceous matter burned out, and which 

 is full of fossil plants. It is also full of the characteristic Laramie shells, such as Dr. 

 White has described and has daily met with throughout the Laramie series. These 

 shells, he informs me, are identical all the way through the Laramie from bottom to 

 top. There is nothing to indicate that there is any difference in the age, so far as the 

 indication from the shells is concerned. This bluff is right on the bank of the Yellow- 

 stone river, and the railroad cuts through it, which makes the cliff there conspicuous. 

 Immediately below there is a short anticline, apparently a little island about a mile 

 in extent, filled with characteristic Fox Hills Cretaceous fossils. I have been on the 

 ground and collected large numbers of them, and everywhere we meet with them: 

 the wheels of the wagon as one drives over them crush the shells, so abundant are 

 thej r ; and there is no doubt that this is a typical Fox Hills bed, in Dr. White's un- 

 derstanding of the term "Fox Hills." Now, so far as I can tell, and so far as he 

 could tell from a careful study of the ground, this Iron bluff deposit — this Laramie or 

 Fort Union leaf-bed — rests directly and immediately upon the Fox Hills bed. If 

 there is any difference of age there is no indication at that point that it has been want- 

 ing from lack of conformity or from any other cause ; and it is certainly a very natural 

 conclusion that when one deposit rests conformably upon another at one point, and 

 when at another point two formations, the lower one being the same as in the first 

 case, have the same order and arrangement, the age of the overlying beds in both 

 regions is the same. That seems to be as clear a case of geological reasoning as we 

 have. 



I observe that our friends across the border, of whom we have representatives here, 

 are still using the term Laramie for this formation. It seems to me that the bulk of 

 their Laramie is nothing more nor less than our Fort Union, and they seem to be some- 

 what in doubt (at least so I learn from reading a paper which reached me only a day 

 or two before I left Washington, with a Christmas greeting from Sir William Daw- 

 son) ; and I do not know but that we might as well settle the question in the way he 

 has settled it in that paper as in any other way. He simply says that the time may 

 yet come when, in fixing our arbitrary position for the line between the Cretaceous 

 and the Tertiary, we may be obliged to draw it through that continuous deposit which 

 we call the Laramie group. 



Dr. Newberry's memory is entirely at fault when he says that in my " Synopsis " 

 I called the Laramie and Fort Union group Tertiary. I have been criticised for 

 arguing that they are Cretaceous. As a matter of fact I did not call them the one or 

 the other or argue for either view. I first gave a perfectly unbiased review of opinion 

 in which the advocates of each view were allowed to state their case in their own 

 words. I then did what had never before been done. I presented the evidence from 

 the fossil plants upon both sides in tabular form, getting together for the first time a 

 fairly complete list of all the upper Cretaceous species the existence of which had gen- 

 erally been ignored in the discussion of the question. These as well as the Eocene 

 species of all parts of the world were directly compared with the Laramie species. 

 The very careful analysis of this table which I made showed that the Laramie flora 

 occupies an intermediate place between that of the upper Cretaceous (above the Da- 

 kota group and Cenomanian) and that of the Eocene. The only conclusion I drew, 



