WARD) HISTORICAL REVIEW OK OPINION. 427 



sumptiou number five, as to the conformity of the Laramie with the 

 Wahsatch grou]), I shall presently proceed to show, is based upon im- 

 perfect knowledge, and is abundantly disi)roved by repeated sections.'' 



Relative to the Fort Union group, he admits that he had never visited 

 that locality, but notes the conflicting evidence of vertebrate and vege- 

 table remains, and Mr. Lesquereux's silence upon the latter in his Tertiary 

 Flora, and remarks (p. 353) that " the further correlation of the upper 

 plant-beds of Fort Union with the Wahsatch (my Vermilion Greek) seems 

 the most prodigious strain. The Wahsatch (Vermilion Creek), or un- 

 mistakable lowest Eocene, is nonconformable with the Laramie. The 

 relations of conformity or nonconformity between the i)lant-bearing 

 beds of Fort Union and the Dinosaurian beds are not given, and there 

 is reason to believe that the plant beds represent a horizon of the great 

 White River Miocene series, which underlies the Pliocene over so large a 

 part of the Great Plains. * • * j apprehend that the i)lant horizon 

 at Fort LTnion will be found to be nothing but the northward extension 

 of the White River Miocene." 



Professor Gope's paper on horizons of extinct vertebrata, in the fifth 

 volume of the Bulletins of the United States Geological and Geo- 

 graphical Survey of the Territories (No. I, Art. II), which appeared early 

 in the year 1879, is of special value as the tirst attempt to correlate the 

 Laramie group with European strata upon the evidence of vertebrate 

 remains. This discussion was repeated without essential change in his 

 great work which forms Book I of the third volume of the final quarto 

 reports of that Survey, published in 1884. The general result is a still 

 further yielding on the part of the writer to the views of the inverte- 

 brate and vegetable paleontologists against the decidedly Cretaceous 

 character of the group. He shows in an instructive way that it bears 

 a very close relation to the Sables of Bracheux and Conglomerates 

 of Ceruy, which are Eocene, but with this difference, "that the char- 

 acteristic genera of reptiles and fishes of the Laramie of North Amer- 

 ica are in America associated with Cretaceous Binosauria and not 

 with Mammalia ; while in Europe they are associated with Mammalia and 

 not with Di)wsauria.^' And he adds : " In arranging the Laramie group, 

 its necessary position is between Tertiary and Cretaceous, but on the 

 Cretaceous side of the boundary, if we retain those grand divisions, which 

 it appears to uie to be desirable to do;" and he admits "that another 

 formation must be added to the series already recognized in France, 

 viz, the Laramie, or Post-Cretaceous." This he does in his table of 

 correlated general sections, on page 50, making the Post-Cretaceous 

 embrace the Laramie and the Puerco, the former in turn being equiv- 

 alent to the combined strata of the Judith River and Fort Union 

 deposits. 



Dr. C. A. White's elaborate report upon his extensive field researches 

 made in 1877 appeared in the Annual Report of the Geological Survey of 

 the Territories for that year, wliicli, however, did not see the light till 



