HUNTINGTON AND GOLDTHWAIT: THE HURRICANE FAULT. 211 
province was exposed as a plain with a slope so slight that but very 
little erosion took place. Plants covered this plain, at least in those 
parts where we saw the unconformity, as is shown by the layer of car- 
bonaceous matter lying just below the surface of that time. The Shina- 
rump conglomerate lying just above has been supposed to indicate an 
immediate return of the sea. There is another possibility, however ; 
and we should like to raise the question whether this may not be a 
continental deposit which was gradually built outward from the former 
shore line of the Moencopie sea. It seems as though when, at the 
beginning of the Shinarump period, the former sea bottom was so far 
elevated as to become a low coastal plain, the land must still have con- 
tinued to pour upon it countless streams of waste which would have 
spread out in the form of very gently sloping confluent fans. If such 
deposits were formed they would be comparable to those now forming in 
the low plains of northern India (Blanford, pp. 382-389) and the high 
plains at the eastern base of the Rocky mountains (Johnson, pp. 613- 
622). The very fact that the Shinarump is more or less conglomeratic 
in all parts suggests a subaerial origin. In the ocean it is hardly prob- 
able that pebbles even though small should be carried a hundred miles 
directly out from the shore and scattered evenly over a hundred thou- 
sand square miles of the sea bottom. Yet such must have been the case 
if the Shinarump is a marine deposit. If, on the other hand, it is a 
subaerial deposit the pebbles are just the sort of small bits of quartz 
that would gradually be washed farther and farther out over the plains 
by streams descending out of the mountains. A still stronger sugges- 
tion of land conditions is found in the arrangement of the sand and 
gravel of the formation. In Toquer Hill, for example, we have a coarse 
sandstone with streaks of quartz couglomerate, sometimes forming long 
regular bands of pebbles ranging up to an inch in diameter, at others 
composed of little flinty pebbles scattered through the sandstone at 
long intervals. Still again it forms old stream channels with distinct 
lateral unconformities, or caps the truncated edges of a series of cross- 
bedded sandstone layers. Cross-bedding on a rather large scale is com- 
mon. Near the top of the Shinarump petrified wood is abundant, and 
we found one complete trunk sixty feet long. The lateral unconformities 
and cross-bedded strata capped by horizontal conglomerate beds are diffi- 
cult to explain except asa result of stream action. The petrified wood 
has been supposed to have been floated into the sea from distant shores 
and to have become water-logged and to have sunk in all parts of the 
plateau province. If this is the case it is difficult to see why the wood 
