﻿GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY OF THE CANAL ZONE. 605 



dovotcd to the West Indies and Central America, or consider parts 

 of the regions; others are devoted to the geologic history of smaller 

 areas that are parts of the region and are too numerous for men- 

 tion here, but many of them have been referred to in my papers 

 on the fossil corals and the correlation of the geologic formations 

 of Panama, forming parts of this volume; while still other works, 

 for instance those by Schuchert * and Willis,^ treat Central America 

 and the West Indies only as parts of much larger areas. 



Schuchert in his work cited undertakes to reconstruct for this 

 region the distribution of land and sea; that is, connections and 

 barrier between the Atlantic and Pacific Basins during Paleozoic 

 time, basing his inferences upon the affinities of the Paleozoic faunas. 

 As I can add nothing to /what he says, I will not summarize his 

 conclusions — the reader may consult his memoir. 



LATE PALEOZOIC. 



The great Appalachian revolution occurred in late Paleozoic- 

 Permian time, and resulted in the northern boundary of the Gulf 

 of Mexico — the southern Appalachian, the Ouachita, and Wichita 

 Mountains. 



The east and west trend in southern Mexico already existed or 

 was developed about this time; while farther to the southeast, as 

 Sapper has shown, Rio Motagua in Guatemala divides two chains 

 of this age, one to the north, the other to the south, with spurs 

 of a third chain farther toward the southeast. Tlie nearly north 

 and south trend of the Coxcomb Mountains in British Honduras, 

 which are composed of sediments apparently of pre-Paleozoic age 

 indicates that the Yucatan protuberant had been outlined in Paleo- 

 zoic, perhaps early Paleozoic time. Granitic debris in Costa Rica 

 and Panama suggests old deformation along east and west lines in 

 those areas. The east and west mountains of Venezuela have an 

 old foundation and certainly date back to the Paleozoic in origin. 

 There is evidence of old deformation in Cuba, rendering it highly 

 probable, if not certain, that the major tectonic trends of Cuba 

 are as old as Paleozoic. Although no Paleozoic rocks have been 

 identified in Jamaica, the inference appears warranted that Jamaica 

 itself dates back to late Paleozoic, as it has been shown by 

 Sapper that the west end of the tectonic features represented 

 in Mosquito and Rosalind Banks and Jamaica already existed 

 in late Paleozoic time. The Cuban and Jamaican trends meet 

 in Haiti and continue through Porto Rico to the Virgin Islands, 



1 S^hiK'hort, Charles, Paleography of North America, Geol. See. America Bull., vol. 20, pp. 427-606, pis. 

 46-101, 1910. 



» Willis, Bailey, Palecgraphic maps, in Outlines of geologic history with special reference to North 

 America, pp. 300, Chicago, 1910. 



