528 



SCIENCE. 



[]Sr. S. Vol. XXII. No. 565. 



stripped of its bark, to thus survive for three 

 seasons? Jas. Lewis Howe. 



Washington and Lee University, 

 Lexington, Va. 



SPECIAL ARTICLES. 



PHYSICAL CHARACTERS AND HISTORY OF SOME 



NEW YORK FORMATIONS.^ 



We are accustomed to define historical geol- 

 ogy as the history of the earth and its inhabit- 

 ants, and this definition no doubt fully covers 

 the subject. But it may be questioned if, in 

 the ordinary treatment of the subject, such as 

 it receives in our current text-books and lec- 

 ture haUs, we do it justice to the full extent 

 suggested by our definition. Is it not too 

 often merely the history of the inhabitants of 

 the earth that we are treating, giving the his- 

 tory of the earth itself, i. e., its physical de- 

 velopment, only scant recognition? I believe 

 I am not going too far when I say that we 

 give proportionately too much attention to 

 the biologic or paleontologic side, and too little 

 to the physical or^ stratigraphic. I do not wish 

 to be understood to say that paleontology re- 

 ceives too much attention in our institutions 

 of learning. Far from it. Paleontology is 

 not receiving a fraction of the attention it 

 requires, and which it will receive in the 

 future when our curricula are more normally 

 balanced. But_ paleontology is not the whole 

 of historical geology. Stratigraphy, or the 

 physical characters and physical history of the 

 rocks of the earth's crust — ^paleophysiography 

 (if I may use a pet term, in spite of objections 

 raised against it) — is fully one half of his- 

 torical geology. 



It is true, of course, that historical geology 

 reposes on a foundation of paleontology — the 

 divisions of the earth's history are based on 

 the progress of life, and not, as has been too 

 often assumed, on breaks in the sedimentary 

 series, extensive and important as these may 

 be. The standard of comparison must be a, 

 series of sediments which contain a continuous 

 record of development, and since it is only in 



^An address delivered before Section E, Ameri- 

 can Association for the Advancement of Science, 

 Syracuse meeting, July 21, 1905. 



marine sediments that we get a continuous 

 series, only marine formations, and such as 

 do not represent merely local conditions, must 

 be selected as our standard of reference. 



Much as we prize, and justly prize, the 

 classical standard of our North American 

 Paleozoic series^ — the incomparable column 

 furnished by the strata of the state of New 

 York — and loath as we may be to attack any 

 part of it, yet we must confess that it is not a 

 perfect column throughout, and that the im- 

 perfection which it embodies can not be over- 

 looked. Indeed, the sworn guardians of this 

 monument have themselves recognized that it 

 is an incomplete structure, and have intro- 

 duced such foreign elements as the Cincin- 

 natian group and the Richmond formation, 

 besides accepting emendations proposed by 

 others, such as Acadian and Georgian. They 

 have, however, sought consolation for this 

 forced recognition of the imperfections of the 

 New York series, by proposing that the world 

 at large accept the broader terms of the New 

 York classification — Taconic, Champlainic, 

 Ontario — in place of the better known, though 

 not always prior, terms Cambric, Ordovicic 

 and Siluric. 



But it is one thing to recognize the absence 

 of an element in the standard series and to fill 

 the gap by a foreign representative, and an- 

 other to regard an old and well-known forma- 

 tional unit as imperfect, and as inexpressive 

 of the time element which it represents, and 

 to acquiesce in its replacement by another. 

 Yet I believe this is what we shall come to in 

 the case of such old standards as the Medina 

 sandstone and the Salina group, not to speak 

 of the Oneida conglomerate, formations which 

 are still tolerated in the standard scale of 

 North American Paleozoic formations, but 

 which in a very imperfect manner represent 

 the chronologic epochs for which they are 

 commonly used. This is due to the fact that 

 they were not deposited in the open sea, but 

 rather under peculiar conditions, i. e., estu- 

 arine, if not continental, in the case of the 

 Oneida and Medina, and salt sea, if not desert, 

 conditions in the Salina. Moreover, it is now 

 pretty well ascertained that the typical Oneida 



