1923] Proceedings of the Elisha Mitchell Society 31 



The studies on which these conclusions are based were begun in 

 1875, in Anson, while the writer was living; in that county. The 

 coarse sandstone associated with the basal conglomerate, is filled with 

 silicified wood, the trunks of trees, but nowhere were the roots of these 

 trees (conifers) observed. These show at Peachland (then Mulcahy) 

 and near to Polkton ; and they are also much in evidence near Chapel 

 Hill. The white and gray sandstones of finer grain just above these 

 yielded the ferns shown; and these few fossils are all recognized as 

 typical of the Permian. They were found near Hornsboro, South 

 Carolina. It was also from Hornsboro, in a stratum above these, that 

 the writer obtained the two cycads reported to this Society in Decem- 

 ber 1894, as from the Triassic. 



Collier* Cobb — The Immediate Ancestor of Our Domestic Horse 

 Found Fossil in Hcdifax County, North Carolina. 



In October Mr. F. M. Laxton, President of the Southern Radio 

 Corporation, of Charlotte, and manager of a contracting company 

 there, called my attention to some bones found in digging for the 

 making of a cesspool at Enfield, and very kindly offered the assistance 

 of his men in getting out the fossils. A few days later he published 

 in the News and Observer a picture of a saurian of a tjq^e scrapped 

 long before the Tapper Miocene, the time of these deposits, as shown by 

 the invertebrate fossils present with these bones. The picture was 

 that of the Plesiosaurus, a marine reptile that lived in Jurassic and 

 Cretaceous times.* 



The bones that had attracted the attention of ]Mr. Laxton were 

 really those of one of the many whales known in the Miocene de- 

 posits along Fishing Creek for a century past. The backbone of one 

 of these creatures was for many years used as a footlog for crossing 

 the creek from near the home of Mr. Applewhite, in Halifax, to the 

 Edgecombe side. When excavating for the foundation of a bridge 

 across this creek three years ago the workmen unearthed several bones 

 to which Mr. Frank Page called my attention. I visited the place 

 and brought several of the bones to Chapel Hill. Nearly two years 

 ago Dr. W. F. Prouty obtained a number of these whale bones from a 

 locality on the same creek. 



On my recent visit, besides obtaining some additional specimens 

 of the whale bones, I have found the left tibia of a horse, a find of 



* For this picture see J. W. Gregory's "Geology of Today. ' opp. p. 2(5(1. 



