244 GEOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE IN NOVA SCOTIA—FLETCHER. 
“Only the knowledge that paleeontologists sometimes “ give 
more consideration to the results of theoretic biologic studies 
than to the already established stratigraphic succession of the 
faunas ” can explain the foregoing table, which offers the alter- 
native of correlating with the Nova Scotian productive coal 
measures, lying thousands of feet above the Riversdale, either 
the Coal Measures of England or the Cretaceous coal-bearing 
wocks of the Pacific coast. : 
The Horton cannot be at the same time above and below 
and on the same horizon as the Riversdale; and Dr. Ami has 
perhaps acted wisely in omitting it from his classification, its 
prominence in the others being due to its being easily accessible 
and first examined. At Horton Bluff it contains only 287 feet 
of strata well exposed on one side of a syncline, and 459 feet, 
not so well exposed, on the other; whereas the section at Har- 
rington River shows nearly 4000 feet of black and gray beds; 
that near Union station 6468 feet of red beds of the upper * 
group alone (of which 684 feet, containing fish remains through- 
out, were remeasured at MacAra Brook); while a great thickness 
of the lower gray and black beds is exposed along the railway 
from Riversdale to West River and in every brook flowing south 
from the Cobequid Hills, these exposures being sometimes almost 
continuous for several miles, as recorded in the reports of the 
Geological Survey. 
Jt will be readily understood that fossils thus studied and 
-applied, having fixed no definite horizon higher than the Lower 
Helderberg, have hindered not helped in mapping the com- 
yparatively simple geological structure of these formations, while 
most satisfactory progress has been made by Mr. Fairbault in 
an investigation of 27,000 feet of more complicated, non- 
fossiliferous rocks comprising the gold-bearing series of the 
‘province. 
* Geol. Survey Report for 1886, Part P, page 65. 
