Lyman.] 614: [Sept. 15, 



In the twenty headings nnder which the agencies which influ- 

 ence human life were arranged, the ancient seers believed they 

 had exhausted the arithmetical unit which stood for the com- 

 pleted individual — his vigesimal equation and correlate; in the 

 thirteen modes of activity which the}' assigned to each of these 

 agencies, they had taken into account the thirteen possible rela- 

 tions of each to both the material and immaterial worlds ; and 

 the fact that the result of 20 X 13 expressed in daj'S gives approx- 

 imately nine lunar months, the period required for the unborn 

 babe to pass through its evolution from conception to birth — a 

 period perfectly familiar even to the wild hunting tribes — gave 

 them whatever needed confirmation they wished for the mj'stic 

 potencies of these cardinal numbers. 



The Great Menozoic Fmilt in New Jersey. 



By Benjamin Smith Lyman. 



(Read before the American Philoso^yhical Society, September To, JS93.) 



Great faults, the ever-ready, easy resource of geologists to cover up 

 their own deficiencies or mistakes, have, without any substantial proof, 

 been liberally conjectured again and again to account for what has been 

 supposed 10 be a wholly impossible apparent thickness of the older 

 Mesozoic rocks of New Jersey. For those rocks have, from their con- 

 J'orraability throughout, and their predominant color and a comparative 

 lack of fossils through a great part of them, been commonly lumped 

 together as only a single group, formation, or system, under the general 

 name of New Red, or Triassic, or Jurassico-Triassic, or Rhaetic. Nearly 

 forty years ago, with the bold assurance born of ignorance, perhaps quite 

 pardonable at that lime, the special name of Newark group was pro- 

 posed for the whole lot, fioin one of its most striking local economic fea- 

 tures, though otlierwise an extremely subordinate one, and even economi- 

 cally perhaps inferior to the Richmond coal ; and latterly there has been 

 an effort to revive the name, long after it had fallen into well-merited 

 oblivion. The assumption has been : the whole series is but one forma- 

 tion ; one formation can be no more than about 5000 feet thick ; therefore, 

 the whole series is at most 5000 feet thick. 



It now appears, however, from recent researches in course of publica- 

 tion by the Geological Survej* of Pennsylvania, that the total thickness 

 of the so called New Red does incoutestably far exceed the thickness 



