14 BULLETIN: MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 
which he says there are Tertiary and Cretaceous rocks in the region, and 
he seems to mean that the upper colored beds somewhat resembling 
the New Red Sandstone of England are Tertiary, and that the impure 
limestones beneath them are Cretaceous. He mentions no fossils, how- 
ever, and gives no reason for calling either of the series by these names. 
In 1865, Prof. Louis Agassiz touched at Parahyba do Norte, and 
Hartt states that he found there fossil estherians from which he (Hartt) 
infers that the deposits are of fresh-water origin and equivalent to the 
Bahia beds which he regarded as of Cretaceous age. This, however, 
was not published unfil 1870. 
Later Hartt set off from the beds later accepted as Cretaceous an 
upper and apparently a well-differentiated series of highly colored and 
mottled beds, and called them Tertiary. This scheme first appeared in 
1868,2 but was treated more fully in his book that appeared in 1870, 
and again in a paper read before the American Geographical Society in 
18714 
This designation of the colored beds, afterwards known as the Ter- 
tiary, commended itself so favorably to field geologists in Brazil that it 
was immediately accepted, though Hartt himself observed afterwards 
that “one may find variegated clays on the Amazonas containing Devon- 
ian and Carboniferous fossils.£ And yet no one ever succeeded in all the 
thousands of kilometres of exposure in finding a single well-defined line 
of division between the Cretaceous and the supposed Tertiary beds,” and 
no one found a fossil in the so-called Tertiary ones, with the possible 
exception of the fossil plants found within the last few years in the State 
of Bahia, the age of which has not yet been determined. But aside 
from these two important wants, the assignment of the horizontal colored 
upper beds to the Tertiary appeared to be a proper one, and no especial 
1 Geology and physical geography of Brazil, p. 445. 
2 C.F. Hartt. Résumé of a lecture on the growth of the South American con- 
tinent, p.5. Reprinted from the Cornell Ета of Dec. 12,1868. Ithaca, N. Y., 1868. 
з С. Е. Наги. Geology and Physical Geography of Brazil, p. 557. Boston, 
1870. 
4 Ann. Rep. Amer. Geogr. Soc. Vol. III, р. 231-252. 
5 The present writer published in 1889 a paper upon the Cretaceous and Ter- 
tiary geology of Ше Sergipe-Alagöas Basin of Brazil. (Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., 
XVI, р. 369-434) in which he followed Hartt's division. 
6 Amer. Journ. Sci. 1872. СІУ., p. 57. 
7 Both Hartt and Williamson say the Tertiary overlies the Cretaceous uncon- 
formably. Geol. and Phys. Geogr. of Brazil, 557; Résumé of a lecture on the 
growth of the South American continent (Ithaca, N. Y., 1868), р. 5. Trans. Man- 
chester Geol. Soc., 1866-67, УТ., р. 114. 
