10 TRANSACTIONS OF THE WAGNER FREE 



The shore at this point was strewn with dead fish, more especially 

 with the remains of the cavalle and cow-fish, an index of the disastrous 

 effects of the cold wave that had recently swept over the greater part of 

 the State. It was almost inconceivable that a sudden lowering of the 

 temperature could have had such a marked effect upon the vitality of 

 animals inhabiting the sea, but the proof of such effect was everywhere 

 apparent, and could not be argued round by any amount of logical theor- 

 izing. The worst effects were, however, to be noted further down the 

 coast. 



At about noon of the next day we made Ballast Point, four-and-a-half 

 miles southwest of Tampa, a spot made famous to geologists and miner- 

 alogists through its numerous silicified shell remains, retained in the most 

 exquisite state of preservation, and the coral-chalcedonies that occur in 

 the form of organic geodes. In the yellow limestone that makes the 

 basal outcrop at this locality I immediately recognized the foraminifcr 

 which Conrad some forty years previously had described as Assi/iiia 

 (Nummnlitcs) Floridana, and from which the age of this portion of the 

 peninsula had been considered established. Conrad had evidently entirely 

 misinterpreted the nature of his fossil, inasmuch as his drawing represents 

 an imperfect individual, or one in which through an irregular removal of 

 the shell layers, exposing a gradational elevation of the disk, the involu- 

 tion of the whorls is made to assume the form of a spiral, instead of that 

 of a series of concentric rings. The rock here was crowded with the disks 

 of this foraminifer many of them in the condition figured by Conrad, 

 others perfect which, as I had already suspected, is no nummulite at all, 

 but a member of the very different genus Orbitolites. This is the first 

 record of this somewhat rare genus being found on the North American 

 continent. Among the other fossil impressions I detected those of 

 Venus pcnita and V. Floridana, also described by Conrad, and of a 

 number of generic types the specific characters of which were too much 

 obscured to permit of clear definition. 



Numerous angular boulders of a tough siliceo-calcareous blue rock, 

 also densely charged with fossils, rest on the yellow limestone above 

 mentioned, but the relative sequence of the two formations could not 

 be determined at this point. Several of the fossil species occurring in 

 this rock appeared also to be contained in the limestone, but the former 

 was distinguished from the latter by the total absence of the foraminifcr 

 Orbitolites and by the presence of vast numbers of casts and impressions 

 of a species of Cerithium. This genus, one of the most abundantly 

 represented and distinctive genera of the Eocene, Oligocene and Miocene 

 formations of Western and Central Europe indeed, of nearly all regions 

 where the early and middle Tertiary deposits are developed to any 

 extent had hitherto been known only by stray individuals in this 



