PALEONTOLOGY OF NEW-YORK. 



That isolated and almost unknown land, Anticosta, has, during the 

 present year, furnished from the same group, and from the succeeding 

 strata, large collections of fossils which prove an almost an entire absence 

 of the arenaceous and coarser sedimentary deposits at that point, while 

 the conditions appear to be almost precisely like those exhibited in Ohio 

 and Indiana. Some of the same species of fossils occur in equal or greater 

 abundance ; the lithological characters are the same, and coral reefs ap- 

 pear to have formed long barriers in this ancient sea ; while the line of 

 the coarser sediments lies to the southeast, trending away through New- 

 Brunswick, Nova-Scotia and Newfoundland, to the North Atlantic. 



Both to the west and east, therefore, of our meridian, were coral seas, 

 abounding also in brachiopods and their usual associates of cephalopods 

 and gasteropods, living in a calcareous mud, and upon a comparatively 

 quiet ocean bed ; while to the east and southeast of these zones, a vast 

 area of the same ocean bed was overspread by coarser materials, abraded 

 from an ancient eastern continent by currents of that primeval ocean. 



Along the shores of this ocean, in a direction from northeast to south- 

 west, from Newfoundland to the southern extremity of the Laurentian 

 mountains, and thence from Canada to Alabama, were spread these im- 

 mense sediments along the line of the present mountain ranges; while 

 on the northwestern and western sides lay the quiet ocean teeming with 

 its inhabitants, and scarcely disturbed by the gentle currents which 

 transported the fine and almost impalpable mud, which in its extreme 

 extension may have reached a thousand miles from the centre of the 

 great accumulation. Interrupted as this area was by the southern extension 

 of the Laurentian into the line of the coarser sediments, and which thus 

 cut off the continuity of the more quiet deposits on the east and west, yet 

 nevertheless the conditions on the two sides were very similar. On both 

 sides we find that widely distributed coral Favistella stellata, with other 

 corals and numerous species of brachiopoda and other shells, which, in 

 the intermediate belt of arenaceous and shaly deposits, several hundred 

 miles wide, have not been observed. 



