1894.1 ^^^ [Lyman. 



publicly recorded facts in other States. It is true the imperfectioa of the 

 records will make the present attempt somewhat conjectural, but there is 

 reason to hope that it may keep well within the not wliolly unprecedented 

 New Red proportions of two bushels of conjectures to two grains of fully 

 ascertained facts. 



Indeed, a great share of what has been voluminously written about the 

 New Red is a mere tissue of conjectures, one part depending on another ; 

 but if their connection be traced from one to another it will be clear that 

 the starting-point or original support of them all is the supposed fact 

 superficially and inaccurately observed, and in any case not necessarily 

 conclusive, that the beds in question were at the outset wliolly, or almost 

 wholly, of a red color. To be sure, dark-colored beds were seen here and 

 there, but were supposed to have become so by the baking of neighboring 

 exposed or subterranean trap. They were sometimes called "indurated 

 shales," though miles away from any visible trap, and their existence 

 above trap beds, even at some distance, was considered by the most skep- 

 tical to be sufficient proof of the intrusive character of the trap. 



The next conjecture was that as the beds were all red, or originally so, 

 they must be of one narrow paleontological period, a conjecture favored 

 by the circumstance that fossils were not very numerous, and in fact, as we 

 shall presently see, were confined in great measure to a very limited por- 

 tion of the whole series. They were all referred indiscriminately to the 

 series merely as a whole, and any diversity of character was overlooked or 

 violently disregarded, and they were by circular reasoning pronounced 

 incapable of belonging to species foreign to that small period. Then it 

 was conjectured that during one narrow paleontological period no very 

 enormous thickness of beds could possibly have accumulated, not more 

 than, say, 3000 or 5000 feet. Then, again, it was conjectured that a series 

 of, at the most, such moderate thickness might well exist in full extent 

 within very small geographical bounds, that in short it was, as has been 

 said of the soul in the human body, "all in every part," and was equally 

 complete in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and 

 in the Richmond (Va.) coal field. The result of borings in that field oc- 

 casioned the conjecture that the whole New Red series was only 1500 feet 

 in thickness, even in Pennsylvania ; and there was probably surprise at 

 finding a boring could be 3000 feet deep without reaching the bottom of 

 the series at Northampton, Mass., where an unprejudiced tyro in geom- 

 etry might have predicted the result as not improbable from the exposed 

 dips. The idea, however, had by frequent repetition become fixed, 

 though in reality a mere conjecture, that the total thickness must be small, 

 and hence came the unhesitating rejection of the apparent thiclcness of 

 14,000 feet in New Jersey and 55,000 feet in Pennsylvania, in spile of 

 their being in truth arrived at by the only means based on published facts 

 then possible, namely, the estimated average dip and the whole geograph- 

 ical breadth of the series. Although, then, the estimates of the total thick- 

 ness have varied from 1500 to 55,000 feet with some slight support from 



