126 Evolution and Distribution of Fishes 



or marine and the Old Red or freshwater rocks. This 

 seems also to be confirmed by the close identity of the 

 fauna, though, as might be expected across so wide an 

 extent of country and stretch of time, some very different 

 and even remarkable types are here met with. 



Reference might now be made to the excellent con- 

 densed description of the formation given by Chamberlin- 

 Salisbury ((5*: 418). There a division into palaeo- meso- 

 and neo-devonic is accepted from Clarke and Schuchert. 

 An examination of these subdivisions, and of their con- 

 tained fossils, demonstrates that steady alternation, of 

 freshwater or land surfaces with littoral or deep-littoral 

 marine areas, took place. 



Further in the exhaustive studies that have been made 

 of the latter by Newberry, Orton, Clarke, Hayes, Prosser, 

 Meek, Worthen, Williams, Gregory, Weller, Fuller, 

 Ulrich, Schuchert and many others, the fauna recorded 

 is uniformly and consistently marine, while it stands out in 

 sharp contrast with the results to be recorded below. But 

 in saving this, exception must be taken to some of the pio- 

 neer work of such distinguished palaeontologists as the 

 earlier leaders of the Ohio survey. Thus in the graphic 

 — though as we would Interpret conditions the entirely mis- 

 taken — word pictures given in Vols, i and 3 of the Ohio 

 survey, {8^:26^; 5^:603) extensive ocean-stretches are 

 put before the minds eye, as being peopled by an abundant 

 marine fish fauna. 



But when we correlate carefully all the Information 

 since gained regarding the Old Red rocks of Ohio, and 

 compare such with 'the descriptions In the above-cited vol- 

 umes, as well as the rock section given in V.3 (Geology) 

 p. 604, instead of regarding all of the rocks as having been 

 deposited In "an ancient sea," or as being "an open-sea 

 deposit," the writer would accept that the lowermost rocks 

 in the Corbin's Mill section which contain flinty nodules, 

 or which are fossiliferous and abound in brachlopods, marine 

 gasterpods etc. are truly marine. But he would emphatical- 

 ly claim that the "shaly limestone," which not unfrequently 

 contained wood of a species of ancient pine {Dadoxylon 

 newberryi Dawson)^ tells of lacustrine or flood-plain con- 



