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series of black bituminous slates, with intercalations now and then, 

 more especially near the base of the fall, of small beds of lime- 

 stone. This system of slate is strongly upheaved, the beds dipping 

 east east south at an angle of 60°, and near the foot of the fall 

 they are almost vertical. They form a sort of amphitheatre around 

 the falls and are prolonged toward the St. Lawrence River, dis- 

 appearing beneath the water and reappearing at the Isle of Or- 

 leans. I find no fossils in this system. The upper part of the 

 fall is formed by a series of blue limestone 40 or 50 feet in thick- 

 ness, almost horizontal near the bridge, but inclined from 10° to 

 15° east east south, on the left side of the fall near the chasm. 

 This limestone, which is a little marly, rests directly on the 

 quartzite rocks ; it contains immense numbers of ramose corals, 

 which were submitted in 1850 to Milne Edwards and Jules 

 Haime, and were identified by those learned paleontologists with 

 the Alveolites repens (Fougt.) of the Upper Silurian of Dudley 

 and Wenlock in England and of Gothland in the Baltic, and 

 nearly related to, if not identical with, a ramose coral of the 

 jNia""ara »roup at Lockport. The Alveolites repejis was the 

 only fossil found by me at Montmorency, and was noted with 

 the suo-o-estion that the limestone belongs to the Trenton or 



"oo 



perhaps the Niagara group. The quartzite and mica-schist have 

 upheaved the hituminous black slates, and the almost horizontal 

 strata of limestone have been deposited after the dislocation. This 

 description of Montmorency Falls ditFers widely from the de- 

 scription published by Mr. Logan, and, now that the question of 

 the Primordial fauna and the Taconic system is brought forward, 

 I have no doubt that those black slates at the foot of Montmo- 

 rency Falls, the strata of the Isle d'Orleans, the city of Quebec, 

 the Plains of Abraham, Point Levi, all the south shore of the St. 

 Lawrence going up the Chaudiere River as far at least as the 

 Chaudiere Falls, which are all strongly elevated, dislocated, and 

 follow the general direction east 20° north to west 20° south, be- 

 lono- to the Taconic system of Vermont and Eastern New York, 

 and that in this system the fossils belonging to the Primordial 

 fauna have been found. I did not see the anticlinal axis with 

 fault, described by Mr. Logan, and I explain the relations of the 

 rocks by a discordance of stratification, caused by upheaval an- 



