.244 GEOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE IN NOVA SCOTIA FLETCHER. 



'Only the knowledge that palaeontologists sometimes "give 

 more consideration to the results of theoretic biologic studies 

 than to the already established stratigraphic succession of the 

 faunas " can explain the foregoing table, which offers the alter- 

 native of correlating with the Nova Scotian productive coal 

 measures, lying thousands of feet above the Riversdale, either 

 the Coal Measures of England or the Cretaceous coal-bearing 

 rocks of the Pacific coast. 



The Horton cannot be at the same time above and below 

 and on the same horizon as the Riversdale ; and Dr. Ami has 

 perhaps acted wisely in omitting it from his classification, its 

 prominence in the others being due to its being easily accessible 

 and first examined. At Horton Bluff it contains only 287 feet 

 of strata well exposed on one side of a syncline, and 459 feet, 

 not so well exposed, on the other ; whereas the section at Har- 

 rington River shows nearly 4000 feet of black and gray beds ; 

 that near Union station 6468 feet of red beds of the upper * 

 group alone (of which 684 feet, containing fish remains through- 

 out, were remeasured at MacAra Brook); while a great thickness 

 of the lower gray and black beds is exposed along the railway 

 from Riversdale to West River and in every brook flowing south 

 from the Cobequid Hills, these exposures being sometimes almost 

 continuous for several miles, as recorded in the reports of the 

 Geological Survey. 



It will be readily understood that fossils thus studied and 

 -applied, having fixed no definite horizon higher than the Lower 

 Helderberg, have hindered not helped in mapping the com- 

 jparatively simple geological structure of these formations, while 

 imost satisfactory progress has been made by Mr. Fairbault in 

 .an investigation of 27,000 feet of more complicated, non- 

 fossiliferous rocks comprising the gold-bearing series of the 

 province. 



* Goal. Survey Report for 1886, Part P, page 65. 



