AND THE REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF VERMONT. Ill 



of Emmons to J. Marcou, Dec. 1860, on " The Taconic system," etc., Proc. Amer. Acad., 

 XII, 118, Cambridge, 1885). 



The Ziorraine shales. — So fiir as my own observations extend, I must say that T did 

 not find the Lorraine shales either north or east of the Adirondacks, and that between 

 the Georgia formation and the Potsdam group, we have in all that region of Lake Cham- 

 plain and the vicinity of Quebec city, between five and eight thousand feet of shales, 

 containing now and then lenticular masses of limestone, sometimes magnesian, some- 

 times pure, sometimes argillaceous. Fossils generally are rare, but they exist; only, in- 

 stead of being found uninterruptedly on ledges of rocks extending for fifty and even 

 hundreds of miles, as is usual, they are limited to special localities, and have a veiy short 

 horizontal range. Li fact, we have in those slates, sporadic apparitions of forms of the 

 second fauna, inclosed in the supra-primordial fauna. About a dozen and even more, 

 say twenty, of those fossils are identical and pass from the Taconic into the Champlain 

 or true Cambrian,^ and when found two or three together, or even six, eight and ten in 

 the same place and locality, always rather narrowly limited, it has been the custom until 

 now, among all the ])aleont61ogists and consequently among the geologists who follow 

 their lead, to say: for the citadel and city of Quebec, it is Utica and Lorraine; for Pointe 

 Levis, Phillipsbui-gh, and Bedford, it is Calciferous and Chazy; for Ilighgate Springs, 

 Swanton, St. Albans' Bay village, it is Trenton limestone, and even at Highgate Springs 

 w^e have according to their views, Black Kiver limestone, Utica and Hudson River (Lor- 

 raine). Farther south at Fort Cassin, it is Birdseye; at the foot of Snake Mountain, 

 it is Trenton and Chazy; at Shoreham, it is Chazy; at Wappinger valley (Dutchess 

 County), it is either Calciferous or Trenton; at Newburgh, it is Trenton; at Stockbridge 

 marl)le quarry, it is Trenton ; the sparry limestone of eastern jS^ew York is also Tren- 

 ton; the so-called hydromica schists are Hudson River (Lorraine), etc., etc. 



The extraordinary geographical distribution of these so-called Calciferous, Chazy, 

 Birdseye, Black River, Trenton, Utica and Lorraine, without any regular connection and 

 continuity, or superposition, makes it a little difficult to classify and account for these 

 capricious outcrops; but faults of all sorts and all shapes are now called in to help. 

 However, it is not sufficient, and new groups or etages — always of the Chamjilain system, 

 but unhappily always also wanting at all Champlain typical localities — have been created, 

 under the name of lower Calciferous, Quebec, Lauzun and Sillery groups (Logan) ; 

 Lewis conglomerate and limestone conglomerate of the Quebec citadel hill (Selwj'u). 



But, notwithstanding all these raoi-e or less artificial helps, with the addition of shoi'e, 

 off-shore and deeper water deposits, it remains to be explained why, in such developed 

 divisions of five to eight thousand feet thickness, we do not find the whole faiuia, say two 

 hundred and fifty species at least, of the Champlain system, so well developed close by at 

 Utica, Sandy Creek, Trenton Falls, Chazy, Isle La Motte, Montmorency Falls, Charle- 

 bourg and Indian Lorette Falls, instead of finding only a dozen or twenty species. Why 



' Less than eight per cent of the species of the primor- tiary and the moilevn faunas. The uniformist rule — each 



dial fauna passing into the second fauna is a small pro- species being always confined to divisions of the second, 



portion, when compared with twenty per cent of the Dc- third and even fourth order of the strata — put forward by 



vonian species passing into the carboniferous, or with the Alcide d'Orbigny and Louis Agassiz was never accepted by 



thirty per cent of the carboniferous passing into the Dyas, Desliayes and Lyell ; and since the discoveries of Barraiido 



or with the thirty-five, fifty and even ninety per cent of Linnarson, Broegger, Dupont, Keyser, Waageu, etc., such 



identical species between the lower tertiary, tlie upper ter- an enipyric law has become totally obsolete. 



