354 P. W. Stuart- Menteath — On the Pyrenees. 



has repeated througliout his entire work in the Pyrenees. It is 

 remarkable that such work has been habitually selected as con- 

 firmation of the paradoxes of M. Marcel Bertrand, and has been 

 habitually opposed to sections of extreme accuracy on a true scale. 

 The work of Suess is in great part founded on generalizations 

 derived from compilations of such sections, and his latest volume is 

 unfortunately concerned with regions where such data cannot be 

 verified and controlled in the manner which I have found possible 

 elsewhere. In the Mining Journal of November 30, 1901, I have 

 given my latest results of such verification ; and such work, however 

 obnoxious to theorists, seems to me incumbent on practical geologists 

 who realize the importance of their science as a basis of industrial 

 operations rather than as a source of confirmation in questions of 

 controversial theology. 



As regards the excursion from Lourdes to Gavarnie, I may 

 remark that in 1865 M. Carez obtained from me a map of the 

 Western Pyrenees, from the ocean to the valley of Lourdes, which 

 appeared in the compiled map of France of Carez and Vasseur. In 

 the Bull. Soc. Geol., 1887, p. 185, I protested against the arbitrary 

 introduction of a mass of Silurian as overlying the Carboniferous. 

 The Survey geologists subsequently confirmed in detail the structure 

 of the district in question as I had described it, and hence the 

 quotation of a gigantic stratigraphical paradox was prevented in 

 this instance, although M. Carez professed inability to understand 

 the meaning of my protest. Similarly, the ofiScial geological map 

 of the Pyrenees, published in 1890, represented as Cambrian the 

 vast band of Upper Cretaceous which I figured for the map of Carez 

 and Vasseur between Cauterets and the Pic D'Orhy. This contra- 

 diction, vigorously sustained against me by M. Marcel Bertrand 

 in November, 1887, would have furnished gigantic examples of 

 the charriages to which the latter writer attributes mountain 

 structure ; but as his reply consisted solely in insinuations of 

 ignorance, and as I have since repeatedly proved his Cambrian to 

 be Upper Cretaceous by admitted fossils at decisive points, it has 

 now been admitted by the Survey geologists to be what I represented 

 it. Since then I have made known two other bands of Secondary 

 rocks in the Palaeozoic of the official map, one north of Gavarnie 

 and one running east and west of Argeles. Each of these is being 

 now vaguely described without fresh proof, so I may here state 

 that I have found five Hippurites in the band of Argeles at 1,200 

 metres north-west of Arcisans-Dessus, while in the band north of 

 Gavarnie I have found the same Lias corals which characterize the 

 base of the Argeles band at the Col d'Espandels and many other 

 points. The Congress might thus have remarked that the Pyrenees 

 resemble the Alps in presenting interior synclinal bands of Secondary 

 rocks from the Trias to the Flysch, although this fact is deliberately 

 contradicted by the official geological map of 1890, whose errors 

 are reproduced in that of Europe which confirms the theories of 

 M. Bertrand. It is an instructive fact that the attempts to introduce 

 the charriage theory in these cases, as at the Pic de Bugarach, are 



