JXXIV GEOLOGICAL AND PALEONTOLOGICAL RELATIONS 



A few years later, in 1685, Martin Lister i^ublished a figure of Ecphora 

 quadricostata. This was the first American fossil to be figured, and 

 the original came from the Miocene of Maryland. Lister's work was 

 republished by Dillwyn in 1823 and his figure of Ecphora quadricostata 

 is reproduced as Plate LII, Fig. 3, of this volume. 



Nothing more of geologic interest seems to have been written re- 

 garding this region until the year 1809 when Silvain Godon published 

 a paper in which he assigned all the country between Baltimore Bay 

 and the right bank of the Potomac, where Washington City is located, 

 to " Alluvium." He did not give boundaries or indicate how far he 

 wished to carry this classification toward Chesapeake Bay, but it is 

 probable that the entire Coastal Plain south of Baltimore and east 

 of the Potomac was included in his conception. 



In the same year, 1809, a noteworthy paper was published by Wil- 

 liam Maclure. He included the entire Coastal Plain of Maryland in 

 one formation, the " Alluvial," and so represented it on a geological 

 map. He described the unconsolidated Coastal Plain deposits from 

 Long Island southward, indicated the boundaries of the Alluvial forma- 

 tion and noted the presence of fossils. This paper was reprinted in 

 substance in various magazines in 1811, 1817, 1818 and 1826. Maclure's 

 views seemed to have attracted considerable attention at first, for in 

 1820 Hayden incorporated them in his " Geological Essays " and 

 attempted to establish the theory that the Alluvial Was deposited by a 

 great flood which came down from the north and crossed North America 

 from northeast to southwest. The following year Thomas Nuttall re- 

 ferred the Coastal Plain deposits to the Second Calcareous formation 

 of Europe, pointed out the fact that it occupied the country east of 

 the primitive and transition formations of the Piedmont Plateau, and 

 fixed Annapolis as about its northern limit. The next year, 1822, 

 Parker Cleaveland brought out his treatise on Mineralogy. In this 

 interesting volume he reproduced Maclure's map and recorded the 

 occurrence of selenite crystals in the Alluvial soil on the St. Mary's 

 bank of the Patuxent river. He probably had in mind the locality 

 directly opposite Solomons Island. 



Professor John Finch, an Englishman, who was traveling in America 



