AMERICAN GEOLOGY DECADE OF 1850-1859. 495 



nature and energy of the crust movements which lifted the Laurentian clays and 

 sands to a height, in one locality at least, of not less than 500 feet, and which drained 

 wide tracts of the Upper Laurentian lakes. The mere agitation or pulsating move- 

 ment of the. crust, if unaccompanied by any permanent uplift of the land, would 

 suffice we would think, by lashing the waters of the tidal estuaries in one quarter 

 and the lakes in the other, to strew a portion of the older drift bordering all those 

 basins in wide dispersion upon the top of the more tranquil sediments; but if such a 

 pulsation of the crust were accompanied with successive paroxysmal liftings of wide 

 tracts of the land, then the inundation would take the form of stupendous currents, 

 the strewing power of which would he adequate to any amount of superficial trans- 

 portation, even to the remote transportation of the larger erratics. 



His ideas regarding vein formation and the origin of quartzite were 

 equally crude. Thus, speculating on the wide distribution of the Pots- 

 dam sandstone, its remarkable uniformity and purely quartzose nature, 

 he wrote with particular reference to the last: 



May we not conjecture that this * * * was supplied from the meat dikes and 

 veins of auriferous quartz, which * * issued in a melted condition through the 



rents and tissures of the crust overall the region of the Atlantic slope. * 

 Outgushing bodies of this quartz mingled with volcanic steam, and suddenly chilled 

 and pelted upon by cold and heavy rains, may have been granulated into sand, as 

 would occur with heated unannealed glass, and then washed in copious streams into 

 broad, shallow, and tide-moved sea, and there gradually dispersed and precipitated. 



From the above it will appear that Rogers was a catastrophist. 

 Further than that, viewed in the light of to-da} T , many of the conclu- 

 sions which he drew from observed phenomena and the theories 

 advanced are strikingly absurd for a man of his learning. This is 

 particularly true with reference to his ideas on the formation of anthra- 

 cite (p. 372), the origin of valleys (p. 493) and mountain chains (p. 371 ). 

 and that of the Potsdam sandstone just mentioned. Indeed, his entire 

 work well illustrates the peculiar, uneven make-up (if I may be allowed 

 the expression) of some of our best workers. Gifted with a mind 

 unequaled for power of observation and deduction, he was yet wholly 

 deficient in theory." " Great men, of great gifts you shall easily find. 

 but symmetrical men, never." 



"The work was favorably reviewed in the American Journal of Science for Novem- 

 ber, 1859, almost the only unfavorable criticism relating to the deficiency of paleon- 

 tological work and the geological nomenclature adopted. "The author has left this 

 great department ( of paleontology) of the survey to future workers. This being so, 

 the author has hardly a broad enough basis for the institution of a new system of 

 nomenclature and of subdivisions for the Paleozoic formations, and especially for 

 diverging in these respects from the New York survey, in which the subdivisions 

 had been founded upon a thorough study of the organic remains. The names of 

 these subdivisions, Auroral, Matinal, Levant, Surgent, and so on. can not be proved 

 to be better than those before adopted. They are founded on the idea of a Paleozoic 

 day, which has had no existence except in the fancy of the writer. This unfortunate 

 framework, about which Professor Rogers has clustered his facts, is no serious 

 impediment to the geological reader who has a key at hand for comparison. 



The work is a great one, worthy of the State which authorized the survey. It 

 contains a vast amount of information in all its departments, and will ever rank 

 among the most important of the reports of the geology of the United States. 



