along the coast today. It is the period when, in the course of evolu- 

 tion, were ushered in those animals which were to be the contempo- 

 raries of man, 95 per cent, of Pleistocene forms, according- to Lyell, 

 being also recent. 



With these thoughts in mind, the task of working on the Pleisto- 

 cene formation in South Carolina has been entered upon gladly, 

 though with many misgivings as to the writer's ability to deal with 

 the problem as its importance demands. Of all the Coastal Plain 

 region from Texas to New England, that portion in South Carolina 

 has been, perhaps, least investigated. The true succession and 

 extent of beds have, in many cases, not been fully determined. The 

 extreme thinness of the Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene beds, 

 and consequently the greater likelihood of their being entirely re- 

 moved in places during periods of erosion, together with the almost 

 universally low altitude of the surface with reference to the sea and 

 the consequent absence of good sections or even many natural 

 exposures of any kind more than a few feet deep, has made it very 

 difficult to trace the succession and extent of these formations. For 

 instance, the patches of Miocene in South Carolina that have been 

 left from erosion indicate that this formation could not have been 

 more than 150 or 200 feet at best, whereas in Texas to the south- 

 west it is more than 2,500 feet thick, and to the north of the State 

 it also gradually becomes thicker. In the region of North and South 

 Carolina there seems to have been a region or belt of elevation or of 

 minimum subsidence, perhaps since Triassic time. This relative ele- 

 vation has caused a thinning of the successive beds since that time 

 in this region. The tracing of the extent and succession of these 

 formations has been engaged in by a good many investigators, from 

 the time Lyell visited the State, in 1841-42, and before on up to the 

 present, or to within the last two or three years, when Dr. L. C. Glenn 

 of Vanderbilt University made some investigations concerning these 

 formations in preparing a paper on "Artesian Well Prospects in 

 South Carolina." The work done by these men will be briefly 

 reviewed in this paper under the heading, "A Historic Review of the 

 Work Done in the Region." 



In preparation for writing this paper, the writer found it neces- 

 sary to do some work in the field, collecting fossils and making 

 observations of the localities where the fossils were found. During 

 the summer of 1904, some time was spent along the coast of South 

 Carolina in collecting Pliocene and Pleistocene fossils from well- 

 known localities, and noting the country around such localities as 



