728 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



Clianey, and others led to the subdivision of the Eocene into seven stages, desig- 

 nated l)y Clark and Vokes in 1936 as Martinez, Meganos, Capay, Domengine, 

 Transition, Tejon, and Gaviota. These units have been set up largely on evi- 

 dence afforded by molluscan, echinoid, and coral faunas. During the past thirty 

 years parallel classifications have been based on foraminifera and an important 

 standard grouping of faunal zones for the Eocene has been proposed by Boris 

 Laiming. A similar scheme for classifying the Miocene on the basis of fora- 

 miniferal zones was proposed by R. M. Kleinpell and at the present time is 

 widely used on the Pacific Coast. The Tertiary formations of Oregon and AYash- 

 ington correspond with some modification to the classifications set up in Cali- 

 fornia, except that the Oligocene is much better developed. The extensive litera- 

 ture resulting from investigations made by geologists of the oil companies, the 

 universities, the State of California, and the U. S. Geological Survey is laying 

 the foundation for a clear understanding of the geological history of the Ter- 

 tiary period on the Pacific Coast. Much of this information has been brought 

 together and interpreted in the important volume on the geology of California 

 by R. D. Reed (1933). 



The stratigraphic succession of Tertiary rocks and their faunas in Japan 

 is being made known through many publications in that country. The important 

 paleontological contribution by W. S. Slodkewitsch on the Tertiary of the Kam- 

 chatka Peninsula in northeastern Siberia shows clearly the close relations of 

 these faunas to the Tertiary of Alaska and Oregon and Washington. 



In the East Indies for over fifty years, beginning about 1880, K. Martin 

 published extensively on the faunas of the Tertiary, determining the ages of the 

 beds largely by means of the percentage of living species present in the faunas. 

 Because of the long distance from the standard European section, correlations 

 with it were difficult. Later in 1931 Leupold and Van der Vlerck elaborated a 

 letter system of classification, from "a" to "h," for the Tertiary of this region, 

 basing it mostly upon the larger foraminifera, and not relating it in detail to 

 the European classification. 



The continental Tertiary deposits of the AVestern interior region were studied 

 by the geologists of the Federal exploration surveys and later by the U. S. Geo- 

 logical Survey, the American Museum of Natural History, and the geologists 

 and paleontologists connected with universities and state and private museums. 

 The rich collections of fossil vertebrates were at first made known by Cope and 

 Leidy, and later during the present century by Osborne, Matthew, Sinclair, 

 Scott, Lull, Lucas, Loomis, Merriam, Stock, Stirton, and many others. Correla- 

 tion of deposits in widely scattered areas have been based on studies of the evo- 

 lutionary development of fossil mammals. The contributions to the fossil floras 

 of the Tertiary by A. C. Seward, D. H. Scott, F. H. Knowlton, E. ^X. Berry, 

 R. W. Chaney, E. Dorf, and many others have been influential in the correla- 

 tion and classification of the nonmarine Tertiary deposits of North America. 

 Quaternary: The unconsolidated surface deposits between the uppermost 

 Tertiary strata and sediments now in course of deposition in England and the 

 plains of Germany were described by Buckland in 1823 as the Diluvium and 

 were thought to have been carried over the land surface by the waters of the 

 Biblical deluge. In 1839 the name Pleistocene was proposed by Lyell for these 

 deposits. Agassiz (1840), who in his youth had studied the action of living 



