THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 143 
for kelp or manure. He may not have seen the Sargasso Sea, 
the tranquil portion of the Atlantic in the neighborhood of the 
Azores, some twenty times in extent of the British Isles, more 
or less covered densely with “Sargossum baseferum.” In 
places it is so thick as to retard the progress of sailing vessels. 
Look again to the submarine forests of the Falkland Islands, 
which astonished Darwin. To the North Pacific Alge found 
about the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, and we are told similar 
ageregations of sea-weeds to the Sargasso Sea are also met 
with in the Indian and Pacific oceans, in the comparatively 
tranquil spaces encircled by rotary currents. Petroleum does 
not appear to be confined to any particular formation or rock 
series, although on this continent it occurs in greater quantities 
in the Corniferous Devonians, looked upon as the age of fishes. 
Some geologists think these were responsible for its produc- 
tion. The remains of fishes may be numerous elsewhere. In 
. Canada they are so rarely noticed that some years ago the 
writer ventured to express his belief that animals of the nature 
of jelly-fish, for instance, which were not at all likely to have 
left any records of their existence, and the coral (Polyp), 
which are found in incredible numbers in the limestone shales, 
etc., together with sea anemonies were probably accountable 
for the production. When formerly collecting fossils in West 
Canada I noticed the Favosites, etc., in the Drift, were fre- 
quently filled with petroleum. The reefs on the northwest of 
Anticosti (Cambro-Silurian) deposits held several corals whose 
cells contained an amber-colored rock oil. I find since I vis- 
ited the island, the Very Rev. Professor Laflamme has also 
noticed its occurrence there, but thinks it probable that no 
erevices or cavities exist in the rocks to act as reservoirs for 
collecting the petroleum. 
At Macdonald’s cave the upper layers of the Hudson rivet 
rocks, where the tide receded, displayed an extraordinary num- 
ber of Fucoid impressions resembling detached branches per- 
haps of a species resembling Hall’s Buthotrephis, the charac- 
teristic conical root and the main stem of the latter were absent, 
no dark stain indicating the presence of petroleum was noticed 
