784: REPORT—1896. 
of alternating shales and thin grits, containing also a few thick beds of quartzite. 
Their present condition furnishes evidence of the intensity of the earth-movements 
which have affected the schistose rocks of Anglesey. 
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18. 
The following Papers and Report were read :— 
1. Pre-Cambrian Fossils. By Sir Witt1AmM Dawson, LL.D., FRS. 
The author stated that it was his object merely to introduce the specimens he 
proposed to exhibit by a few remarks rendered necessary by the present confusion 
in the classification of pre-Cambrian rocks. He would take those of Canada and 
Newfoundland as at present best known, and locally connected with the specimens 
in question. 
He referred first to the ‘ Olenellus Zone,’ and its equivalent in New Brunswick, 
the ‘Protolenus Fauna’ of Matthew, as at present constituting the base of the 
Cambrian and terminating downward in barren sandstone. This Lower Cambrian 
had in North America, according to Walcott, afforded 165 species, including all 
the leading types of the marine invertebrates. 
Below the Olenellus Zone, Matthew had found in New Brunswick a thick 
series of red ard greenish slates, with conglomerate at the base. It has afforded 
no Trilobites, but contains a few fossils referable with some doubts to Worms, 
Mollusks, Ostracods, Brachiopods, Cytideans, and Protozoa. It is regarded as 
equivalent to the Signal Hill and Random Sound Series of Murray and Howley in 
Newfoundland, and to the Keweniar, and the Chuar and Colorado Canon Series 
of Walcott in the west. The latter contains laminated forms apparently similar 
to Cryptozoon of the Cambrian and Archiozoon of the Upper Laurentian. 
The Etcheminian rests unconformably on the IIuronian, a system for the most 
part of coarse clastic rocks with some igneous beds, but including slates, iron 
ores, and limestones, which contain worm-burrows, sponge-spicules, and laminated 
forms comparable with Cryptozoon and Eozoon. The Huronian, first defined by 
Logan and Murray in the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, has been recognised in 
many other localities, both in the west and east of Canada and the United States; 
but has been designated by many other local names, and bas been by some writers 
included, with the Etcheminian and sometimes with part of the Laurentian, in the 
scarcely defined ‘ Algonkian ’ group of the United States Geological Survey. 
Below the Huronian is the Upper Laurentian or Grenville system, consisting of 
gneisses and schists (some of which, as Adams has shown, have the chemical com- 
position of Paleozoic slates), along with iron ore, graphite, and apatite, and great 
bands of limestone, the whole evidently representing a long period of marine 
deposition, in an ocean whose bed was broken up and in part elevated before the 
production of the littoral clastics of the Huronian age. It is in one of the lime- 
stones of this system that, along with other possible fossils, the forms known as 
Eozoon Canadense have been found. The author did not propose to describe these 
remains, but merely to exhibit some microphotographs and slices iliustrating their 
structure, referring to previous publications for details as to their characters and 
mode of occurrence. 
Below the Grenvillian is the great thickness of Orthoclase gneiss of various 
textures, and alternating with bands of hornblende schist, constituting the Ottawa 
gneiss or Lower Laurentian of the Geological Survey. No limestones or indica- 
tions of fossil remains have yet been found in this fundamental gneiss, which may 
be a truly primitive rock produced by aqueo-igneous or ‘crenitic’ action, before 
the commencement of regular sedimentation. 
The author proposed, with Matthew, to regard the Etcheminian series and its 
equivalents as pre-Cambrian, but still Palsozoic; and, as suggested by himself 
many years ago, to classify the Huronian and Grenvillian as Eozoic, leaving the 
