1862.] 207 [Lesley. 



words, if analogies between the Nova Scotia and the United States 

 coals compel us to consider them synchronic, if not originally conter- 

 minous ; and if the Clinton fossils of New York, and even the Dye- 

 stone* iron ore of Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, be found 

 at Arisaig, and along a well-defined outcrop in the direction of Truro; 

 surely the Second Mountain, Little Mountain, Orwigsburg Mountain, 

 and Summer Hill, upon the Schuylkill River, must be represented 

 by the Antigonish Mountains of Nova Scotia, and by the Sydney and 

 St. Peter's Range in Cape Breton : and this, whether the Nova 

 Scotia carboniferous rocks or subcarboniferous limestones be de- 

 posited upon the Devonian conformably or unconformably. The Pro- 

 vince is in fact a wide belt of mountains partially submerged; and 

 may have been to some extent in the same condition at the beginning 

 of the Coal era. In the Antigonish Hills we may have principally 

 Formation VIII, while in the country south of the Lake Bras d'Or 

 ■we may have the full series of VIII, IX, and X. The Arisaig for- 

 mation, with fossils once thought by Hall and Lyell to be Hamilton 

 and Chemung, and now considered by Hall and Dawson to be indis- 

 putably Clinton, although overlaid and concealed along most of its 

 extent by apparently nonconformable coal-measures, gives us a fixed 

 lower limit for the so-called metamorphic hill country of the Province, 

 which makes this hill country necessarily Devonian, or Formations 

 VIII, IX, and X. Even if we object to the terra Devonian, and 

 permit the palaeontologists to carry down the term Carboniferous, or 

 the term Subcarboniferous, step by step, so as to include first, For- 

 mation X, perhaps rightly, and then the genuine Old Red IX, and 

 even, as the effort is in the Western States, to include Formation 

 VIII down to its black shale beds with coal, the change of term will 

 not change the lithology, — the mountains of Nova Scotia must still 

 be the representatives of the Catskill, Mohantongo, Terrace, and Al- 

 leghany Mountains of New York and Pennsylvania. 



The eye can hardly be mistaken in the features of the roadside 

 banks between Antigonish and Merigonish ; the road defiles through 

 hills of VIII. Equally certain is it that the outcrops on the road 

 from St. Peter's to Sydney are of the reddish and greenish sand rocks 

 of IX and X. The road for forty miles winds along the lake shore, 

 and in and out of ravines descending from a group of parallel moun- 

 tains of these formations, made parallel by a system of parallel anti- 



* Described by Dawson, p. 58, supplementary chapter to Acadian Geology, 

 August, 1800. 



