48 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
middle basin, the ‘‘Basal’’ Cambrian deposits are wanting, and it is 
assumed that this area was above the sea when the Basal beds were 
being deposited in the southern and in the northern basin (“Long 
Reach’’). 
These deposits have volcanic rocks at the bottom, and at some 
places where the contact of these volcanic rocks with the underlying 
complex can be seen, the surface of the older rocks has been weathered 
and softened before the deposition of the volcanics, as though the ridge 
of older rocks had been above the sea before the former had been de- 
posited upon it. 
For this reason and others, it is also thought that the southern 
basin was in part at least, above the sea at the time that the felsites 
etc., which border it, were extruded. For the basin was walled in on 
both sides by ridges of these volcanic rocks parallel to each other on 
opposite sides of the valley in which the basin lies, one ridge known as 
the Quaco hills separating it from the Bay of Fundy, and the other 
called the Loch Lomond hills bordering it on the North side. 
On the inner slopes of these volcanic ridges, and between them and 
the gray strata of the St. John group, lie the red sandstones and slates 
that compose the Etcheminian strata in which organic remains are 
rare, the most distinct being poorly preserved Brachiopods and Hyo- 
lithids. Yet these form the first water-washed deposits of the Cam- 
brian series and are of special interest on that account. At the western 
end of the basin one sees but little foreign matter, where the lowest 
of the red beds come in contact with the underlying deposits; but at 
the eastern end the fragmentary rocks at the contact contain rounded 
pebbles of quartz, showing derivation from some other source than the 
volcanics whose fragment forms the principal mass of the basal 
conglomerate. Thus, tho’ there is a break at this point, it is not a 
very obvious one. 
The few fossils found in the red rocks give but little promise of the © 
wealth of forms that appear in the grey mud beds of this basin, at a 
later time, in the Cambrian fauna of the Paradoxides Zone, so largely 
exhibited in the numerous species at St. John, or even in the less 
prolific Protolenus Zone below them. 
The Protolenus Fauna. 
The Protolenus shale beds are based on a fine-grained gray sand 
stone which is spread all over the St. John basin. Unweathered it is 
of a pale greenish gray color, but it weathers almost white, and thus 
becomes a conspicuous land-mark at this horizon; it appears to be the 
basal member of the St. John group in this basin. 
