2 A. R. C. SELWYN ON THE 
commendable and necessary in the political arena, should never be admitted to the domain 
of science. Bearing these principles in mind, and above all that unity is strength, I trust 
that the members of the Geological Section of the Canadian Royal Society will henceforth 
be brethren of the hammer not in name only, but in very act and deed; that they will 
at all times cordially co-operate with and assist each other in friendly emulation in the 
work they have in hand, that of elucidating the geological history, physical and biological, 
of this great country in which the harvest waiting to be gathered from the rocks is so 
abundant, but unfortunately the labourers are as yet so few. 
THE QUEBEC GROUP. 
I will now pass to the subject which I propose to submit for the consideration of the 
Geological Section. It is one which has attracted more attention and upon which during 
the past forty years there has been more discussion and difference of opinion than upon 
any other question in connection with the geological structure of Hastern North America. 
I refer to the character and relations of the great belts of crystalline, sub-crystalline and 
fossiliferous strata embraced in the Appalachian Mountain system. I propose, however, 
now to speak only of that portion of it which constitutes the extension through Canada of 
the Green Mountains of Vermont and to which my personal investigations have been 
mostly confined. 
The formations occupying this area in Canada are known to geologists, chiefly through 
the labours of my predecessor, Sir William Logan, as the “ Quebec Group,” and are very 
fully described in the XI. and XXII. chapters of the Geology of Canada, 1863, as well as in 
earlier reports of the Geological Survey, especially those of Sir William Logan dated Ist 
May, 1845, and Ist May, 1848, the latter published in 1849. 
The history and the details of the various conflicting opinions that have from time to 
time been published on this subject up to 1872 are ably and fully stated by Dr. T. Sterry 
Hunt in his report on Azoic Rocks, Part I, Report E., Second Geological Survey of Penn- 
sylvania. And therefore my remarks in the present communication will be confined to 
those points affecting the structure which I have personally investigated in the field. 
These may be summarised as follows :— 
1. The relative age and the stratigraphical relations of the comparatively unaltered 
and fossiliferous, and then, so far as known, entirely non-fossiliferous, altered and sub-crys- 
talline portions of the so-called Quebec group. 
2. The relations and character of the upper part of the metamorphic group, chiefly 
developed on the south-east side of the central axis from Potton township on the Vermont ° 
boundary north-eastward to Cranbourne on the Etchemin River, and on the north-west 
side of the axis from near Ste. Marie on the Chaudiere north-eastward to St. Gervais, Armagh 
and Montmagny townships. These together with certain other areas of somewhat similar 
rocks which come within the fossiliferous belt in the townships of Granby, Milton, Acton 
and Roxton south of the St. Francis River and again north of that river in Simpson, Horton, 
Levis, and several other localities along the south shore of the St. Lawrence to Cape Maque- 
reau, in Gaspé, and which have all been mapped and described as troughs of Sillery sand- 
stone, form the supposed upper member of the Quebee group of Logan. 
