AMERICAN GEOLOGY EATONIAN ERA, 1820-1829. 269 



an animal .some 5 feet in length were also mentioned as having been 

 found in this sandstone at East Windsor." 



The year following Prof. Chester Dewey came forward with a paper 

 in the same journal. A Sketch of the Geology and the Mineralogy 

 of the Western Part of Massachusetts. This was likewise aceom- 

 Deweyonthe panied by a hand-colored geological map designed as :i 



M e ^sfchu f srttI Stern continuation of Hitchcock's and carrying the field of 

 1824, observation as far west as the Hudson River. 



Working from the Hudson River eastward, he found a belt of transi- 

 tion argillite succeeded by a broad belt of graywacke with included 

 areas of the argillite; this followed by another continuous belt of the 

 same, and then one of transition limestone and a narrow one of primi- 

 tive argillaceous slate directly along the border line of New York and 

 Massachusetts. Beyond this, in Massachusetts, a broad belt of prim- 

 itive limestone with included areas of mica slate, quartz rock, and 

 transition shell and compact limestone, which still farther to the east 

 became the predominant rock, with a narrow area of gneiss, a small 

 one of granite, and one of talcose slate. 



The most pretentious piece of field work accomplished by Amos 



Baton was that done under the direction of the Hon. Stephen Van 



Rensselaer in 1N^4, and comprised a geological and agricultural survey 



of the district adjoining the Erie Canal. The results 



Eaton's Survey of . .. . . 



the Erie Canal, of this survey were published in a quarto volume of 



163 pages, which was accompanied by a geological sec- 

 tion extending from Albany to Lake Erie, and one b} r Edward Hitch- 

 cock from Boston to Plainfield, the two combined enabling Eaton to 

 give a continuous section all the way from Lake Erie to the Atlantic 

 Ocean at Boston Harbor. 



To judge from the introductory remarks in this report. Eaton had 

 been accused of a disposition to create new names. He. therefore, 

 here announced that he had made use of European names, so far as 

 possible, but had found at least five distinct and continuous strata, 

 none of which could, with any propriety, take a name given in any 

 European treatise which had thus far reached this country. 



He found along the line of the canal rocks belonging to the prim- 

 itive, transition, and secondary series. AH these were described in 

 considerable detail, but almost wholly with reference to their litho- 

 logical features. When fossils occurred, such were noted, but were 

 not utilized as aids to correlation. 



The prevalent ideas on chemical geology are well brought out in 

 certain parts of his discussion. He recognized the fact that many of 

 the valleys were excavated in the softer and more soluble rocks, like 



"These bones were at first thought to be possibly human, but the finding of evi- 

 dences of a tail at least 5 feet in length caused the abandonment of this idea! ( Amer- 

 ican Journal of Science, III, 1821, p. 247.) 



