AMERICAN GEOLOGISTS AND NATURALISTS. 63 



and jpeteorites recently made by him. A specimen of meteoric 

 iron taken from a mass of many pounds weight in Grayson Co. 

 Virginia, was found to contain 6.15 per cent, of nickel, and gave 

 a very slight trace of chlorine. A meteoric stone from Georgia, 

 made up of shot-like grains of nickeliferous iron, with slender 

 flattened threads of the same mineral imbedded in a paste com- 

 posed chiefly of silicate of magnesia and alumina, gave no indi- 

 cations of chlorine. The grains yielded 7 per cent, of nickel. 



Prof. W. B. Rogers stated that he had examined a mass of 

 meteoric iron from Roanoke County, Virginia, and was unable 

 to detect in it the slightest trace of chlorine. A fragment of me- 

 teoric stone from Ashe County, North Carolina, examined at the 

 same time, was found to contain a marked quantity of this prin- 

 ciple, the presence of which, however, was accounted for by the 

 fras^ment having been in contact with a bag of salt, as it was 

 carried home by the person who found it. 



Prof. Hitchcock read a paper " on a New species of Ornithich- 

 nite from the valley of the Connecticut river, and on the Rain-drop 

 Impressions from the same locality." 



After Prof. Hitchcock's observations respecting the bird tracks 

 of the Connecticut valley, IVIr. Lyell alluded to the subject of the 

 cause of the present dip of the formation, expressing the opinion 

 that it is due, in part at least, to an uplifting of the strata. 



Prof. H. D. Rogers mentioned the reasons which had induced 

 him to attribute the dip of the beds in the other great tract of this 

 new red sandstone, or that which ranges southwestward from the 

 Hudson, to oblique deposition. A uniform northerly dip of about 

 fifteen degrees prevails entirely across the basin, even where it is 

 twelve or twenty miles in breadth, and coexists with a manifest 

 shallowness of the deposit. This want of vertical depth is seen 

 in several places in Pennsylvania, where denudation has exposed, 

 in the interior of the tract, large patches of the older Appalachian 

 strata, upon which this new red formation rests unconformably. 

 No traces of dislocation occur to lead to the inference that the 

 shallowness of the basin is deceptive, and that the present want of 

 depth in the deposit has been caused by a succession of upthrows 

 with denudation. The steady northerly dip is very rarely influ- 

 enced, either in amount or in direction, by any of the numerous 

 dykes of trap which penetrate the formation. 



Prof. Rogers next mentioned facts which go to show that the 

 formation of the Connecticut valley and the equivalent one of the 

 Middle States, are in all probabflity, accumulations in two origi- 

 nally distinct estuaries. He mentioned as one evidence, the inde- 

 pendent direction of the dip in the two basins, and stated that the 



