GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE IS INDEBTED TO CANADA: 5 
When Sir William -Logan commenced the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842, the 
older rocks, in so far as his field was concerned, were almost a /erra incognita, and very 
scanty means existed for unravelling their complexities. The “ Silurian System” of Mur- 
chison had been completed in 1838, and in the same year Sedgwick had published his 
classification of the Cambrian rocks. The earlier final reports of the New York Survey 
were being issued about the time when Logan commenced his work. The great works of 
Hall on the palæontology of New York had not appeared, and scarcely anything was known 
as to the comparative paleontology and geology of Europe and America. Those who can 
look back on the crude and chaotic condition of our knowledge at that time, can alone ap- 
preciate the magnitude and difficulty of the task that lay before Sir William Logan. 
To make the matter worse, the most discordant views as to the relative ages of some of the 
formations in New York and New England which are continuous with those of Eastern 
Canada, had been maintained by the officers of the New York Survey. 
Sir William made early acquaintance with some of these difficult formations. His first 
summer was spent on the coast of Gaspé and the Baie des Chaleurs, where he saw four great 
formations, the Quebec group, the Upper Silurian, the Devonian, and the Lower Carboni- 
ferous, succeeding each other, obviously in ascending order, and each characterized by 
some fossils, most of which, however, were at that time of very uncertain age. I remember 
his showing me in the autumn of that year the note-books in which he had carefully 
sketched the stratigraphical arrangements he had observed, and also the forms of charac- 
teristic fossils. But both wanted an interpreter. The plants of the Gaspé Devonian were 
undescribed ; many of them of forms till then unheard of. The shells and corals and 
graptolites of the older formations could be only roughly correlated with some of those in 
the New York reports. The rock formations are very unlike those of the New York series. 
Still this work of 1842 and 1843 was plain and easy, compared with that which arose in 
tracing these formations to the south-west. I may add here that I have since studied 
some of these Gaspé sections with Sir William’s manuscript note-books in my hand, and 
have been amazed at the extraordinary care and exactitude with which every feature of 
the rocks had been observed and noted down. Much of the detail in these early note-books 
of Sir William still remains unpublished. Those who would detract from the work of Sir 
William Logan, if there are any such, should remember these early beginnings, and com- 
pare them with the massive foundations which have been laid for us to build upon. 
And now, after the labour of more than thirty years on the part of Sir William and 
those he had gathered around him, how do these subjects stand? (1) We have all the 
comparatively flat and undisturbed formations of the great plains of Upper and Lower 
Canada, our share of the interior continental plateau of America, worked out and mapped, 
and their fossils characterized so that a child may read them. (2) The complex hilly dis- 
tricts, with their contorted, disturbed and altered beds, which extend from New England 
to Gaspé, have been traversed in every direction, the limits of their different formations 
marked, and a theory as to their age and structure put forth, which, whether we accept it 
or not, has in it important features of the truth, and rests on facts on which every disputant 
must take his stand. (3) We have the still older formations of the Laurentian hills traced 
in their sinuous windings, and arranged in an order of succession which must stand 
whether the names given by Sir William, and now accepted throughout the world, be ob- 
jected to or not. After the work of Sir William Logan, no cavilling as to names can ever 
