192 STRATIGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY. 



England. As it is known that the Appalachian strata abound as far to the N. E. as 

 Nova Scotia, and perhaps Newfoundland, and spread to a great distance north and 

 north-westward in the continent, the prodigious magnitude of the Appalachian sea, at 

 least in its earlier periods, is made apparent. But while these fossiliferous beds of 

 the White Mountains make it probable that the continuity of this sea was unbroken by 

 any land in the position of New Hampshire before the Levant period, they indicate as 

 plainly that some land did emerge after this period had commenced. How long sub- 

 sequent to the deposition of the earlier Levant strata that portion of the bed of the 

 ocean was uplifted into land, it is not practicable very positively to ascertain, until we 

 are certain of the latest age in which any of the fossiliferous rocks of the White Moun- 

 tains were produced. That the elevation was before the Carbottiferous period, which 

 witnessed the final draining of the Appalachian sea, seems manifest enough from two 

 considerations. 



It is almost certain, in the first place, that none of the Appalachian strata of the mid- 

 dle or latter ages were deposited within this region ; for no traces of the coal rocks 

 nor of the fossiliferous J'ostmedial s/iales, (Marcellus shales, &c.,) nor any of the red 

 shales referable either to the later Levant or the Ponent (Catskill group) periods have 

 yet been met with : and since these newer palaeozoic formations abound both to the 

 S. W and N. E. we must infer that their absence in this locality is due to a lifting out 

 from the bed of the sea previous to their deposition. Had they been dejDOsited within 

 this area, some remnants of these strata would almost certainly have been preserved 

 from denudation in the close folds or synclinal bends of this contorted district. In the 

 second place, there is abundant evidence in the region of the Hudson valley, where 

 the Levant rocks rest almost horizontally on the upturned edges of the Matinal, that 

 the bed of the Appalachian waters underwent a local disturbance at the close of the 

 Matinal period, and it is equally obvious that the direction of this disturbance, as seen 

 in the course of the axes of elevation and depression, was different from that of the 

 subsequent movement by which all the deposits at the end of the Appalachian ages were 

 contorted and upraised. So in like manner we may perceive, in the structure of the 

 White Mountains, the proofs of two distinct intersecting systems of dip, the compo- 

 nents of two separate sets of axes or contortions of the crust, indicating two different 

 epochs of elevation. One of these, and apparently the latest, is a N. N. E. and S. S. 

 W. set of anticlinal and synclinal folds ; and is therefore probably a part of the gen- 

 eral movement which lifted the whole Appalachian or Alleghany chain, and drained 

 away the palaeozoic waters ; but whether the other accords as nearly in direction and 

 date with the earlier system of the Hudson valley, the epoch of which was either at the 

 close of the Matinal or early in the Levant times, is an important and interesting ques- 

 tion which only future research can answer. The most natural inference from all the 

 facts would seem to be, that in the somewhat disturbed period last referred to, when, 

 as geologists are already aware, all the more ancient Appalachian rocks, from the ear- 

 liest to perhaps the Levant sandstones, suffered a contortion and general outlift in the 

 region which is now the northern part of the Hudson valley, the same disturbance and 



