294 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
On Bear Island workable coal beds were laid down in late Devonic 
time. 
Throughout the Devonic, but more especially in the Lower and 
Middle Devonic, the entire area of the New England States and the 
maritime provinces of Canada was in the throes of mountain making, 
combined with a great deal of volcanic activity. At the same time, 
many volcanoes were active throughout western Europe. 
Carbonic.—The world-wide warm-water condition of the late 
Devonic seas of the Northern Hemisphere was continued into those 
of the Lower Carbonic. These latter seas were also replete with a 
varied marine life, among which the corals, crinids, blastids, echinids, 
bryozoans, brachiopods, and primitive sharks played the important 
roles. Limestones were abundant and with the corals extended from 
the United States into arctic Alaska. Reefs of Syringopora are 
reported in northern Finland at 67° 55’ N., 46° 30’ E., on Kanin 
Peninsula (Ramsay). ven several superposed coal beds, and up to 
4 feet in thickness of pure coal, of early Lower Carbonic age, occur 
at Cape Lisburne, overlain by Lower Carbonic limestones with corals. 
It is generally held that the world climate at this time was uniformly 
mild and the many hundred kinds of primitive sharks lead to the 
same conclusion. ‘There were in the American Devonic 39 species of 
these sharks, in the Lower Carbonic not less than 288, in the Coal 
Measures 55, and in the earliest Permic only 10.. They had no 
enemies other than their own kind to fear, and as the same rise and 
decline occurred also in Europe, we must ask ourselves what was the 
cause for this rapid dying out of the ancient sharks during and shortly 
after early Coal Measures time. With the sharks also vanished most 
of the crinids, but otherwise there was an abundance and variety of 
marine life (wide distribution of large foraminifers) with much 
limestone formation. The vanishing of the sharks does not appear 
therefore to have been due solely to a reduction of temperature, but 
may have been further helped by the oscillatory condition and retreat 
of the late Lower Carbonic seas. 
Toward the close of the Lower Carbonic, or after the Culm and its 
coals of western Europe had been laid down, mountain movements on 
a great scale began to take place in central Europe, and then were born 
the Paleozoic Alps of that continent. These mountains, Kayser tells 
us, Were in constant motion but with decreasing intensity throughout 
the Upper Carbonic, culminating in “a mighty chain of folded moun- 
tains.” Toward the close of the Upper Carbonic began the rise of 
the Urals, which was finished in late Permic time when the Paleozoic 
Alps of Europe were again in motion. These movements are also 
traceable in Armenia and others are known in central and eastern 
Asia. Likewise, in America, the southern Appalachians were in 
movement at the close of the Lower Carbonic, but the greatest of all 
