92 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



From the town of Plattsmouth the shales dip southward and 

 those exposed at that place are soon lost from view below the 

 river bed. No attempt appears ever to have been made to 

 carefully correlate the formation with any exposed further 

 south, and consequently the beds shown along the Missouri 

 river between St. Joseph and Kansas City have always been 

 considered independently of those of the region to the north. 

 There is, however, one exception. Swallow* says, incident- 

 ally, that a certain limestone of his upper coal series is 

 exposed at Belleview, at the mouth of the Platte, near St. 

 Joseph, and elsewhere southward. This statement is mani- 

 festly little more than a happy guess. It was only very 

 recently demonstrated beyond much doubt that the limestone 

 so well exposed at the first named locality and the one in the 

 top of the bluffs near St, Joseph are'the same. But as Swal- 

 low in the same sentence just referred to made three other 

 different limestones continuous with this one, it is safe to con- 

 clude that he had 'merely surmised the connection between 

 the limestones of all four localities. 



In the recent geological work done in Kansas there has 

 come to be widely recognized through the eastern part of the 

 state a conspicuous limestone which has been named after the 

 hill on which the State University stands, the Oread lime- 

 stone. There is now but little doubt that it is identical with 

 the Plattsmouth limestone of Nebraska and Iowa. The term 

 Oread was first used by Haworthf in 1894. ' At a subsequent 

 date, J the name was extended so as to include two limestones 

 separated at the typical locality by twenty feet of shale. Its 

 wide extent in Kansas was recognized, and it was correlated 

 with the Stanton (or Plattsburg) limestone of Missouri. 

 Bennett§ traced the Oread north from Leavenworth nearly to 

 Iowa Point and regarded it as probably equivalent to Broad- 

 head's No. 150. 



Platte Shales. — In the Nebraska sections there appear above 

 the Plattsmouth limestone over 100 feet of shales, to which 

 the term Platte may be appropriately applied. The name 

 was first used by Meek, || who called the rocks exposed from 

 Omaha to Nebraska City the "Platte division" from its 



* Missouri Geol. Sur., 1st and 2d Ann. Repts., p. 79, 1855. 

 t Kansas Univ. Quart., Vol. II, p. 123, 1894. 

 $ Ibid., Vol. Ill, p. 278, 1895. 



Univ. Qeol. Sur. Kansas, Vol. I, p. 63, et seq., 1896. 

 II U. B. Geol. Sur. Nebraska, p. 85, 18T2. 



