428 A. C. LANE 



but little stress can be laid on any such series. The Verne bunch 

 are, however, at a fossiliferous (Mercer) horizon often quite close 

 together, showing as a 7- to 8-foot wall with partings (compare the 

 Stockton coal) and it is curious that White gives 13 horizons in the 

 West Virginia Upper Pottsville. 



I have an idea that they give a drowned-river-valley effect to the 

 southeast side of the basin, the longest axes of the coal running north- 

 westerly in a very irregular way, but the general shore-line trending 

 southwesterly from Huron County, something like the Carolina shore 

 south of Hatteras turned around. 



POSSIBLY PERMO-CARBONIFEROUS ? 



35. Woodville sandstone. 1 10 feet (Conemaugh) . — Winchell sepa- 

 rated off above the coal measures a sandstone 79 feet thick he called 

 the Woodville. It was named from an exposure at Woodville near 

 Jackson. 



Now, at Maple .Rapids, St. Johns, Ionia, and Gladwin,^ we find 

 a brown or reddish sandstone. This is not a normal color for a 

 coal-measure sandstone. It may be that this reddening is an effect 

 of weather, but I think not, and we may as well call it Woodville 

 until we know the Woodville does not represent it. Ionia would be a 

 much better name. The Woodville exposure is not red but buff. 

 Still it is weathered, friable, and over 40 feet thick. From the way 

 these red beds occur in some wells but not in others near by in the 

 Saginaw Valley we may be pretty sure that they are unconformable to 

 the series below. I suspect, therefore, that it is not Allegheny but at 

 earliest Conemaugh, some land-formed deposit of the late Carbonifer- 

 ous (Pennsylvanian) or early Permian. No fossils are known. The 

 red formations seem to be more abundant in the western part of the 

 state but that part is heavily covered with drift, and the redness may be 

 a purely secondary Mesozoic oxidation. 



During the rest of the Paleozoic,^ the Mesozoic and the Tertiary 

 Michigan was, so far as known, out of water, though there is reason 

 to believe that at the time of the Cretaceous the sea reached nearly or 

 quite to it, and it was nearly worn down to base level. At some time 

 everything from Niagara to Keweenawan around Lake Superior was 



1 Vol. Ill,, Part 2, 158, 159, 164, 166, 195, 196, 197. 



2 Schuchert, PI. 84. 



