p. 219) as occurring in what he is pleased to call the Lower Fort Union, 

 but which includes the Lance Creek and Hell Creek beds and their sup- 

 posed equivalents. One might almost imagine it to be a list of plants 

 found in a recently investigated corner of the world on the latitude of 

 Louisiana. On page 225 it is stated that a number of species are yet liv- 

 ing, while others are so obviously close to living species as to be separated 

 with difficulty. Such inert organisms, subject also to all the vicissitudes 

 of life on the land, can hardly be regarded as good indicators of the pas- 

 sage of time. Since that epoch the genera, families, and even orders of 

 warm-blooded vertebrates have almost completely changed. 



The opinion held by some distinguished geologists and paleontologists 

 that the so-called Laramie beds, or all of these except the lowest, belong 

 to the Tertiary appears to have rested until recently, at least, mostly on 

 the statements of Professor Leo Lesquereux, the paleontologist of the 

 Hayden Survey. He and Dr. Hayden at first regarded these deposits as 

 belonging to the Miocene, but later as belonging to the lowermost Eocene. 

 Passing over Lesquereux's earlier writings I refer to one of his latest 

 utterances on the subject, found in the eighth volume of the monographs 

 of the Geological Survey of the Territories, part three, published in 1883. 

 On page 109 Lesquereux makes this statement: 



The flora of the Laramie group has a relation, remarkably defined, 

 with that of Sezanne. 



Now, the flora of Sezanne, a town in France, comes from beds that 

 belong to the Thanetian, at the very base of the Lower Eocene. Les- 

 quereux's statemeut is followed by a table of the species which he sup- 

 posed had been found in the Laramie at various localities. The beds at 

 some of these localities are now known to be somewhat older than any 

 Laramie, those at one or two localities a little younger than Laramie. In 

 the table is a column in which are checked off the species of Laramie 

 plants that Lesquereux believed to be identical with or closely related to 

 species found at Sezanne; in another column the species that he supposed 

 were found also in the Oligocene of Europe; in a third column those that 

 he believed to occur also in European Miocene deposits. Naturally, one 

 would expect, in view of Lesquereux's statement quoted above, that the 

 identical and closely related species of the Sezanne column would out- 

 number those of the Miocene column. On the contrary, only three species 

 were regarded by him as identical with Sezanne species, while twenty- 



