IN NOVA SCOTIA FLETCHER. 239 



Carboniferous of England. (2) The Riversdale and Harrington 

 River series are assuredly newer than the Horton and have a 

 most pronounced Upper Carboniferous facies. (3) The plant- 

 bearing beds near St. John, N. B. are not Middle Devonian but 

 Carboniferous and are the exact equivalents of the Riversdale 

 series. 



Dr. Whiteaves adds : " Our knowledge of the organic 

 remains of the Devonian of Nova Scotia is still in its infancy,, 

 and it would seem that the plant-bearing beds near St. John, 

 N. B., which have so long been regarded as Devonian, may 

 possibty be Carboniferous." 



Admitting apparently that " a classification by faunas alone 

 is one-sided and that the physical history of the strata should also 

 be considered," Dr. Ami, in 1899, set aside the authority of the 

 palaeontologists mentioned above and accepted the order of super- 

 position* given by " the two geologists on the Canadian Survey 

 staff, who have studied the question from a stratigraphical and 

 lithological point of view," but, as a sort of compromise, for their 

 name Devonian he substituted <% Eo-Carboniferous," just as he had 

 previously employed the word " Eo-Devonian " for the so-called 

 Lower Oriskany of Nictaux. This stratigraphical sequence has 

 indeed been admitted by all geologists who have examined it in 

 the field. Richard Brown, Campbell, Gesner, Lyell, Honeyman, 

 Logan, Poole, Ells, Fletcher, Selwyn and others in Nova Scotia ; 

 Gesner, Hartt, Matthew, Bailey and Ells in New Brunswick ; 

 Murray in Newfoundland ; Ells and Whiteaves in Gaspe all 

 place these rocks beneath the Carboniferous Limestone, near 

 the debatable line between Carboniferous and Devonian, in 

 man}'' indisputable sections where no thrust-faults, outliers, 

 overturned fossil trees or other agency of theoretical biologists 

 are available to make part Devonian, part Coal Measures. 



It becomes, then, a question of the transference across this 

 line not of a few feet of strata but of a system of 10,000 to 

 15,000 feet of beds cut off from a marine formation both above 



* Ottawa Naturalist, Vol. XIII, No. 9, p. 207. 



