CARBONIFEROUS DISTRICT OF COLCHESTER AND HANTS. 257 



also curious little pairs of oval impressions of the character of those 

 found in the Silurian rocks of Canada and New York, and formerly 

 Fig. 80.— misichntes •''"Pposed to be fucoids, to which the name Buso- 

 carbonarius— Ha.\{- phycus was applied. Regarding them, for reasons 

 way River. stated in a paper on the subject published in the 



Canadian Naturalist, to be burrows of Trilobites 

 or other crustaceans, I have proposed for them the 

 name Musichnites, and have described the present 

 species as M. carbonarius (Fig. 80). These and 

 the worm-tracks above mentioned are best seen 

 at Halfway River, between Horton- and Windsor. 

 No coal has been found in these rocks. 

 It is evident that in the section above described, we have the occur- 

 rence, in the very lowest i)art of the Carboniferous system, of beds 

 very similar to the Middle Coal formation as it occurs in Cumberland, 

 though sufficiently distinct in their mineral characters and association 

 of fossils to prevent us from confounding the two ; an error which has, 

 however, been committed by some of the earlier writers on the geology 

 of the country, and has led to much additional confusion. Beds of 

 similar character and age occur at Halfway River, near Windsor, on 

 the St Croix River, at Upper Rawdon, and at the Gore. In all these 

 localities they skirt the base of the slate hills. On the north shore of 

 Hants, they have been thrown up to the surface by an anticlinal bend 

 of the strata, and are seen at Five Mile River, Noel, Teny Cape, and 

 Walton (Fig. 81). In all these places they appear to underlie the 

 great Lower Carboniferous marine limestones. We have observed a 

 similar fact at Hillsborough, and it also occurs in some parts of the 

 eastern coal districts. We may therefore conclude that in the very 

 dawn of the Carboniferous era, before or coeval with the formation of 

 the great limestone and gypsum beds, conditions somewhat similar to 

 those afterwards so extensively exemplified in the true coal measures 

 prevailed very widely in Nova Scotia. This is not in any way unac- 

 countable, for we have no reason to doubt that marine deposits were 

 forming somewhere when alluvial flats existed at the Joggins, or that 

 there were shores, dry land, swamj)s, estuaries, and lagoons, contem- 

 porary with the seas in which the Hants and Cumberland limestones 

 were formed. At the same time, it is true that in the older Carbon- 

 iferous period marine deposits were formed in the greatest quantity, 

 while in the later portion of the period there was much more of swamp 

 and estuary deposition. 



We may now direct our attention to the strictly marine deposits 

 which rest upon the Horton lilnfT bods, and wliioli may be seen along 



