6 SIR J. W. DAWSON ON SOME POINTS IN WHICH AMERICAN 
deprive Canada of the glory of being the home of the scientific exploration of the Lauren- 
tian; and much examination of the ground which he explored enables me to affirm that 
no one will ever be able permanently to overset the general leading subdivisions which 
he established in the Laurentian and Huronian systems. 
We may sum this matter up, in so far as Sir William Logan’s work is concerned, and 
that of his assistants, and of Hall and Billings in the department of paleontology. Their 
researches have established :—(1) The general diversity of mineral character in the Palæo- 
zoic sediments on the Atlantic slope as compared with the internal plateau of Canada. In 
these results Bailey, Matthew and Hartt in New Brunswick, and the writer in Nova 
Scotia, have also borne some part. (2) The establishment of the Quebec group of rocks as 
a series equivalent in age to the Calciferous of America, and to the Arenig and Skiddaw of 
England, and the elucidation of its peculiar fauna. (8) The tracing out and definition of 
the peculiar faulted junction of the coastal series with that of the interior plateau, extend- 
ing from Quebec to Lake Champlain. (4) The definition in connection with the rocks of 
the Quebec group, by fossils and stratigraphy, of formations extending in age from the 
Potsdam sandstone to the Upper Silurian, as in contact with this group, in various relations, 
along its range from the United States frontier to Gaspé; but the complexities in connec- 
tion with these various points of contact, and the doubts attending the ages of the several 
formations, have never yet been fully solved in their details. (5) The identification of the 
members of the Quebec group and associated formations with their geological equivalents 
in districts where these had assumed different mineral conditions, either from the associa- 
tion of contemporaneous igneous beds and masses, or from subsequent alteration, or both. 
It is with reference to the results under this head, the most difficult of all, that the greater 
part of the objections to Sir William’s views have arisen, and that recent discussions and 
observations have somewhat modified his conclusions. 
I may be permitted to add that we hope to have at this meeting a communication 
from Prof. Lapworth, so well known as an authority on Graptolites, in which he compares 
the fossils of this group found in Canada with those of Europe, and while giving important 
new light on the whole subject, substantiates the conclusions previously arrived at by 
Canadian geologists, and published in local reports and periodicals. 
In the wide-spread Siluro-Cambrian, Silurian and Devonian formations of the great 
interior plateau of the American continent, the geologists of the State of New York have 
had the start of us, and Hall stands facile princeps as their interpreter. Hall has, indeed, 
by his services to Canadian paleontology, as well as to that of the United States, entitled 
himself to adoption as a Canadian, and has been so adopted by various societies and insti- 
tutions, but next to him we have a right to place Billings, whose accurate work and 
sagacious insight are unsurpassed, and whose industry is evidenced, as I am informed by 
his successor, by his descriptions of more than one thousand new species and sixty-nine 
new genera, while he has added not merely to our catalogue of Canadian fossils but to the 
knowledge of the world. Another special claim of Canada is that to the ownership of the 
Guelph formation, a fossiliferous group wanting in the State of New York, and thus filling 
a gap in the history of life in the Silurian age in America. The fossils of this formation 
were studied by Mr. Billings, and still more recently the collections of Mr. Townsend, a 
local collector, have been described by Mr. Whiteaves, and have added several new fauna 
to those previously known. 
