52 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM vol. 7ft 



underlying formations, Whitehouse, Balclatchie, and Stinchar — the 

 brachiopods and trilobites of which he described — seemed to offer any 

 decisive chies at all. In the case of the Stinchar, as is rather fully 

 brought out in the notes on the British column of the correlation table 

 (see p. 84), the amazingly contradictory faunal evidence included in 

 Keed's list of its fossils served mainly in upsetting every hypothesis 

 that suggested itself. Then after noting the large proportion of 

 species said to be common to the Stinchar and the Balclatchie and at 

 the same time the species in both that should, according to American 

 standards, be much older, I could only assume that either many types 

 began much earlier in Scotland than in our sequence of formations or 

 as many or more began much later. Considering that Reed recog- 

 nized the relations of the Girvan faunas as closer to those of America 

 than usual with British faunas this state of affairs seemed inex- 

 plicable. Something appeared to be wrong but what it might be 

 could not be determined till my visit to Scotland the i^ast summer 

 and after the discovery of new evidence in northern Virginia a few 

 months before. 



However, in seeking to force some conclusion out of the tangled 

 skein of fossil evidence I directed my efforts particularly to the 

 trilobites in the Balclatchie and the Whitehouse lists. These gave 

 the impression that the Balclatchie is as old as the Whitesburg or at 

 least not younger than the Athens. This possible conclusion was; 

 suggested by the following facts : First, the nearest allies of the Bal- 

 clatchie species of Anipyx and Lonchodoinus seem to be those found 

 in the Whitesburg limestone and in the Athens shale. The Whites- 

 burg also contains a trilobite very similar to Tornquistia cf . nicholsont 

 Reed, a Keisley limestone species identified by that author in both 

 the Balclatchie and the Whitehouse of the Girvan district. Another 

 fact that was given some weight is the occurrence of several species of 

 Acidaspidae in the Whitesburg limestone of Tennessee and Virginia 

 that fall into Raymond's new genus Onchaspis and are closely similar 

 to species described by Reed as found in the Balclatchie. Then there 

 is the Balclatchie species Reinopleurides hcurrandei^ which again is 

 much like some of our Whitesburg and Athens species. 



The Scotch species of Telephus also seemed to point to some per- 

 haps low horizon in the Blount. The older of the two, T. salteri 

 Reed, was found in the Balclatchie. But the holotype of this differs 

 so much from all other species of the genus that I am still at a loss to 

 decide which of them it resembles most. For the present then its 

 significance in stratigraphical correlation is inappreciable. The other 

 species is credited to the Whitehouse group and was referred by Reed 

 to the Bohemian genotype, T. fractus. Study of the specimens in 

 the British Museum that were used by Reed has convinced me that 



