Lesley.] 104 [November. 



tlipre, than are called for between the coal areas of the British Pro- 

 vinces. The general bordering of the sea-coast with coal-beds, and 

 the long and parallel stretches of Carboniferous rocks through the in- 

 teiior, are all cogent arguments for continuity of the original coal 

 areas, and therefore for the contemporaneity of the remaining portions 

 of the coal-beds. As the same coal-beds which now cap the highest 

 mountains of the Alleghanies in Northern Pennsylvania, and have 

 been swept away over wide intervals of Devonian valleys between them, 

 descend also into the depths beneath the beds of the lowest valleys 

 drained by the Swatara, the Schuylkill, the Lehigh, and the Susque- 

 hanna North Branch, so I have no doubt the coal-beds, whose edges 

 we now see only along the sea-shore of Nova Scotia, or on the sides 

 of the interior low lands, did once ride over the tops of its metamor- 

 phic Devonian mountains, whose summits, crowned with cliflPs, op- 

 posing anticlinal and synclinal dips, remind the Pennsylvanian geo- 

 logist, at every view he takes of them, of those mountains on which 

 the coal still lies in fragmentary patches in his native State. 



What, then, are the thousands of feet of rocks included in Divi- 

 sions Nos. 5, 6, 7, and 8, of Logan's great section ? In other words, 

 the 7630 feet over which Dawson climbed to reach the bottom of his 

 " true coal-measures ?" 



What, I ask in reply, are those wide stretches of low, rolling, ara- 

 ble country, with a red shale soil, which the traveller sees spreading 

 around all the productive coal areas of Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, 

 especially the latter ? To the geologist from the West they afford 

 fiimiliar scenery. He can hardly persuade himself, sometimes, that 

 be is not riding through Lykens or Locust or Catawissa or Trough 

 Creek Valleys in Pennsylvania, over the chocolate-colored soils of 

 No. XL This formation, 5000 feet thick around the southern An- 

 thracite coal-fields, becomes, indeed, thinner and thinner northwest- 

 ward, until it is but 500 in the Alleghany Mountains, and not more 

 than 50 beneath Pittsburg. But along its thickest line it extends 

 from Alabama to New Jersey, a good thousand miles. It is not sur- 

 prising, then, to see it stretching still another thousand miles further 

 in the same direction, and spreading undiminished around the coal 

 areas of Nova Scotia. 



Division No. 5 of Logan's section, consists of red shales and sand- 

 stones chiefly, 2012 feet thick. There is no reason why this should 

 not be the representative of Formation No. XI, or of its upper part. 

 If it be objected that Division No. 6 is in fact a coal system with 

 nine beds of coal and numerous bituminous limestones, the objection 



