124 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 



afterwards this important discovery was also announced 

 in France. 2 



The far-reaching significance of Shumard's results and 

 their bearing upon the proper interpretation of the so- 

 called Permian section of Kansas, of the uppermost coal 

 measures of Missouri, and of the general, or schematic, 

 section of American Carbonic rocks, appear, until lately, 

 to have been entirely overlooked. Only when the Car- 

 bonic section of the Rio Grande region is critically exam- 

 ined and paralleled with that of the Mississippi Valley 

 province do the real positions of the several parts of 

 the latter present themselves. 



The main discussion of a Permian equivalent in Amer- 

 ica has always centered around the age of the rock- 

 sequence in Kansas. My own survey of the facts chances 

 to be singularly critical. After a rather wide acquain- 

 tance with the Carbonic rocks of Missouri and eastern 

 Kansas, I had the good fortune, in company with Messrs. 

 Karpinsky, Pavlow, Tschernychew, Amalitzky, Nikitin, 

 Stuckenberg, and other Russian geologists, who had 

 given the subject most attention, to examine carefully 

 many of the sections of the original Permian rocks of 

 eastern Russia. While the Russian and American se- 

 quences of the Carbonic rocks were recognized as remark- 

 ably alike lithologically I attempted to show 3 that if any 

 parallelism was possible only the uppermost terrane, that 

 next to the Cimarronian Red-beds of the Kansas section, 

 had any likelihood of proving to be eventually of Permian 

 age. Faunally the greater part, at least, of the disputed 

 Kansas section must be compared with the Russian 

 Artinsk formation, which is, as is well known, very much 

 older than any of the original Permian beds. This is 

 the section which I had distinguished as the Oklahoman 

 series; 4 it includes the Chase and Marion formations in 



2 Bull. Geol. Soc. France, II. 15:531-533. 1858. 



3 Jour. Geol. 7:332. 1899. 



4 Am. Geologist, 18:27. 1896. 



