376 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



the New Red sandstone deposits to this agency, but he would have the 

 entire sedimentary series of the New York .system dependent on 

 the same causes. Thus, writing of these rocks: "And we can perceive 

 no region from which such a vast amount of mineral matter can have 

 been abraded and washed away * * * unless it has been brought 

 by the equatorial and polar currents in their ceaseless flow through 

 all time since the ocean has occupied the surface of the earth." Again: 

 '"And these depositions seem to have been formed in a kind of eddy 

 produced by the meeting of the flow of warm waters of the Gulf 

 Stream through the Mohawk Valley with the polar current through 

 the Champlain and Hudson valleys. 11 To the presence of this cold 

 polar current on the east he attributed also the comparative paucity 

 of fossil remains in these rocks when compared with those same hori- 

 zons to the west, and to the same joint action of polar and equatorial 

 currents, the formation of the coal beds. The equatorial current, he 

 argued, performed a circuit around from New Mexico along the 

 Rocky Mountains, a part flowing into the polar sea and Hudson Ray 

 and the remainder through the northern part of the United States 

 and southern part of Canada, where it again divided, one part flowing 

 over and through the St. Lawrence Valley and the remainder over the 

 Mohawk Valley and along the Blue Ridge around once more to the 

 Mississippi, where it would rejoin the same stream, a polar current 

 meantime flowing through the St. Lawrence and Hudson valleys to 

 the valleys of the Red River of the North and the Mississippi. The 

 meeting of these currents at particular points would produce eddies 

 and consequent stagnation of the current. The transported organic 

 matter, becoming water-logged, w T ould sink to the bottom. This mode 

 of formation, he thought, would account for the presence of tropical 

 vegetation in the polar regions. 



The white, red, mottled brown, and blue clays and variegated sands 

 of Long and Staten islands he regarded as the geological equivalents 

 of certain beds of New Jersey underlying the drift and Quaternary 

 and of Cretaceous age. The materials he thought to have been derived 

 from the breaking down of the gneissic, granitic, and other crystalline 

 siliceous rocks which extend parallel to the Atlantic chain from Georgia 

 to Maryland and reappear again in Connecticut and Rhode Island, 

 extending probably into Massachusetts. This material, to him, bore 

 evidence of transport from the southwest, and he believed the Gulf 

 Stream, as before, to have been the transporting agent, its velocity 

 being checked by the southward-traveling polar current. These cold 

 currents sinking to the bottom would not be conducive to growth of 

 animal lift 1 , and hence the beds are comparatively nonfossilifterous. 



Mather believed that during the Quaternary division of time a 

 vast inland sea occupied the basin of the St. Lawrence and Hudson 

 valleys, and that during this time the clays and marls were laid down, 



