666 REVIEWS 
existed in the South Isthmian and Central American region, extending 
in echelon arrangement from the longitude of Trinidad through forty 
degrees to near that of Acapulco, Mexico, directly across the path of 
the main continental trends.” Palaeozoic rocks are known with cer- 
tainty, in the general area under consideration, in but one region, viz., 
in the Republic of Guatemala, and the adjacent Mexican border region. 
Their surface development is certainly very meager south of the United 
States. Triassic rocks, likewise meager south of the United States, also 
occur in Guatemala, but Jurassic beds are not known at any point 
in Central America. Cretaceous strata are much more widely dis- 
tributed in tropical America; but while they cover most of Mexico, it 
is doubtful if the two oceans were at any time connected across this 
country in the Cretaceous period. This conclusion is based on palzon- 
tological evidence. 
As to the Tertiary beds, the facts now in hand “indicate the 
existence of a continuous littoral of older Tertiary sediments around 
the Caribbean side of the tropical American region, and incidentally 
a preéxisting land which they bordered... .. These older Tertiary 
beds . . . . probably belong to the continuous series of sediments of 
the Eocene and Oligoceneepochs. .... The Pliocene formations have 
not been clearly distinguished .... from the Pleistocene. There is 
an intermittent fringe of alleged Pliocene deposits around the Carib- 
bean coast, unconformably deposited against the older continental mass. 
. . . . We may infer from the relatively slight area of the marginal 
development of rocks of this period, and their absence in the ele- 
vated or folded regions away from or much above the coast line, that 
it was just prior to the Pliocene period or during its earlier days that 
the Caribbean coast line, as a result of the tremendous orogenic 
processes by which the earlier Tertiary rocks were deformed, practically 
assumed the slope as we now know it.” 
In elaboration of this point, it is further stated that the early Ter- 
tiary strata have ‘“‘since their deposition been elevated above the sea to 
great heights by folding on the Caribbean side of the old Isthmian 
protaxis until they stand 3000 feet in Guatemala, 5000 in Talamanca, 
Z00) near Colon and )50oates Cantasenay wee In Hayti, Cuba, and 
Jamaica, these plicated, Cretaceous, and early Tertiary rocks are found 
at altitudes exceeding 10,300, 8000, and 7250 feet, respectively, above 
the ocean. The east and west strike both of the Tertiaries and of 
the basic igneous rocks along the northernmost coast of South America 
