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EDWARD W. BERRY 



the Lafayette in the vicinity of Glen Allen, Fayette County, 

 Alabama, should be assigned to the Tuscaloosa. In several sec- 

 tions across the Cretaceous of northeastern Mississippi in the 

 latitude of Tupelo and Booneville, the Lafayette cover in all 

 observed exposures resolves itself into the weathered beds of the 

 Cretaceous. The same statement is true in the writer's judgment 

 of the great cut near Cypress, Tennessee, on the Southern Rail- 

 way. This whole section was included in the Orange Sand by 

 Hilgard and figured diagrammatically on p. 1 6 of his Geology of 

 Mississippi, though it was subsequently shown that the basal 

 part was Ripley Cretaceous. The writer visited this exposure 

 during the past season and failed to see any reason for not includ- 

 ing it all in the Ripley. Furthermore, at a large number of localities 

 throughout the Mississippi embayment area, Pleistocene terrace 

 deposits have been referred to the Lafayette formation. 



During 1 910 it was the writer's privilege to spend considerable 

 time in the collection of fossil plants in Lafayette County, Missis- 

 sippi, and northward as far as Cairo, Illinois. It might be added 

 parenthetically that five previous field seasons spent, for the most 

 part, along the inner margin of the coastal plain from New Jersey 

 to Mississippi have afforded considerable opportunity for observ- 

 ing the so-called Lafayette. 



It has been commonly supposed for some years back that the 

 Lafayette formation of Mississippi and western Tennessee was not 

 a unit, since remains of the so-called eolignitic flora have been 

 reported from time to time as occurring in it at numerous localities. 

 It has been assumed, however, that these plants came from the 

 Eocene clays beneath overlying Lafayette materials. While at 

 most of the localities visited during 1910 the Wilcox clays with 

 leaf impressions are overlain by reddish sands of no considerable 

 or uniform thickness, this is not always the case, as is well shown 

 by one of the exposures along the Illinois Central Railroad just 

 north of Oxford, Miss. The outcrops in these railroad cuts, a 

 number of views of which, from photographs by the writer, are 

 here reproduced, were the type-sections of Hilgard's Orange Sands 

 and Lafayette. Here as at every other locality where the writer 

 collected plant fossils in Lafayette and Marshall counties, Missis- 



