In the Red Beds of Texas 261 



upon them, to find that they were concretions which 

 had so closely imitated cocoanuts in shape and color 

 that even I, an experienced collector, had been mo- 

 mentarily deceived. I knew, too, of a man who ex- 

 hibited a collection of large concretions as fossil 

 Hubbard squashes, and I heard no one doubting that 

 they were all that their labels claimed. 



There are two distinct formations in the Permian 

 of this part of Texas which give character to the 

 surface of the country. They are as different as if 

 separated by hundreds of miles. I visited one lo- 

 cality on Pony Creek, where the red beds lay on top 

 of the gray beds conformably. Looking to the 

 west, a vast panorama, desolate and forlorn, of 

 crumbling and denuded bluffs, narrow valleys, and 

 beetling crags, spread out before me, with the usual 

 red color dominant everywhere, its monotony re- 

 lieved only here and there by the green of some 

 stunted mesquite or patch of grass. To the east 

 stretched the narrow valley of Pony Creek, whose 

 topography is the same as that which is so familiar 

 to the residents of eastern Kansas a ledge of gray 

 sandstone forming a narrow escarpment on either 

 side and following the trend of the hills around the 

 ravines, with grass coming down in gentle swells to 

 meet it or rising to it from the bottom lands below. 

 The greatest thickness of this sandstone, as I ob- 

 served it, was at the head of a narrow gulch near my 



