Fauna of the Niagara and TJiyper Silurian Bodes. 115 



difficulties, nevertheless Eastern Wisconsin has a fauna which in 

 variety, beauty, perfection and numbers cannot be excelled by 

 a similar collection, within the same extent of country on either 

 hemisphere. 



Could the distinguished Prof. L. Aggasiz have examined our 

 corals, Echinoderms, Brachiopoda, Lamellibranchs, Gasteropoda, 

 Cephalopoda and Trilobita, no doubt he would have exclaimed, 

 " why sir, the sight of this display would make an eastern natur- 

 alist crazy." 



On one occasion after a recent excavation by blasting at Schoon- 

 macker's quarry, I measured a coral disk about twenty feet in 

 diameter, three feet in height, and more than sixty feet in circum- 

 ference. The surface was made up of beautiful concentric layers, 

 like the flattened whorls of a gasteropod, and were covered by very 

 pretty Heleolites. 



Cruising around such coral eminences, were the "lords of the 

 invertebrates," the Orthoceratjtes, the straight variety of Cephalo- 

 poda, measuring over twelve feet in length and twenty inches in 

 circumference, and having siphuncles so peculiar in shape and ex- 

 pansion, that Prof. H. A, Ward, notwithstanding his large ex- 

 perience and observation, declared these different from any species 

 he had seen in the old or new world, because the pyrimidal-cone- 

 shaped siphuncle of the base, or last chamber, resembled much 

 the contour of a Belemnite. 



Here also was the gigantic Phragmoceras having a base twenty 

 one inches in circumference, six inches deep, and a seven inches lat- 

 itudinal aperture, and extremely macrochcilus or long lip, for per- 

 fect specimens collected of five species of Phragmoceras make Prof. 

 Hall's description of a single specimen of our species, compara- 

 tively a myth, and his Phragmoceras, nestor is simply a descrip- 

 tion of a mutilated specimen of a Phragynoceras macrocheilus. 

 Prof. Hall's Gomplioceras septoris has the curvilinear figure of a 

 Phragmoceras^ or Cyrtoceras, and in general aspect much resem- 

 bles B. Phragmoceras callistoma (Barrande), delineated in Wood- 

 ward's Modern and Fossil Shells, Of the four varieties of Oompho- 

 ceras, one may prove to be G. scrinium or G. Marcyi of Winchell. 



The gasteropoda of the Lower and Upper Silurian and Hamilton 



