﻿Fo\dout 



L \stPage(sV- 



Eocene Outcrops in Central Georgia 



portion of this cut, which become upon drying a light olive gray, 

 remind one at once of the uppermost Lignitic or Woods Bluff 

 beds about Ozark, Alabama, as described in Bulletin 9. We 

 notice that the fossils consist mainly of bivalves, and though 

 seemingly whole while in the wet clay, crumble and fall to pieces 

 on drying or exposure to the atmosphere. They are gone entirely 

 from the upper part of the cut, and their presence there ever 

 might even be questioned. 



General stratigraphy of Woods Bluff beds. — Before entering 

 into details regarding this upper Lignitic fauna, we may well 

 devote a little space to a consideration of the geographical posi- 

 tion of this outcrop in its relation to outcrops of like age further 

 west. 



Specimens recently sent from a well at Sour Lake, Texas, 

 2,500 feet in depth showed molluscan forms closely related to 

 Melanopsis planoidea Aid. and Ostrea var. of some of the large 

 Lignitic species. 



The Sabinetown bluff we have already identified with the 

 Wood's Bluff beds. But between this locality and Alabama we 

 have seen no traces of an upper Lignitic horizon. We would 

 naturally expect to find such beds constituting the upper strata of 

 the great Lignitic embay ment of the Mississippi valley, recently 

 mapped in our Louisiana Survey Report for 1902. Hilgard's 

 identification of fossils from this horizon from the Lake Provi- 

 dence borings we have shown in the Report just mentioned to be 

 erroneous. Farther east the Woods Bluff beds are typically 

 displayed through the second tier of counties from the southern 

 border of Alabama. 



Easternmost outcrop. — So far, we are impressed with the 

 extreme southern location of all these beds. Our surprise is 

 therefore the greater when we find this Woods Bluff outcrop 100 

 miles east and 75 miles farther north than any outcrop ever before 

 known. 



That the Lower Claiborne beds take this northeasterly deflec- 

 tion upon crossing the Chattahoochee is well known; though they 

 are often hidden by younger deposits, they do crop out in central 

 Georgia as we have just proven, and come again to the surface in 

 great force in the Carolinas, to feather out again in southern 

 Virginia. 



Meaning in Embayment history.— -The bearing of these facts 



