ANCIENT WATER LEVELS OF CHAMPLAIN-HUDSON VALLEYS 219 



thus newly defined, during the slumbers of the Silurian sense of 

 the name, quickly passed in American geologic literature into an 

 astonishing breadth of meaning and usage as wide as the conti- 

 nent itself and was stretched to embrace deposits laid down 

 before, during and after the peculiar drift deposits from which 

 in the Vermont report of 1861 the Champlain clays were accu- 

 rately discriminated as the result of a definite process acting at 

 a subsequent time. Whatever confusion may be attributed to 

 the application of the term Champlain to the postglacial marine 

 deposits of the northeastern part of America by the Vermont 

 geologists it is clear that the original account did not contemplate 

 the inclusion under this term of practically all the Postpliocene 

 stratified sands and clays in other parts of the continent. This 

 most extended use of the term is found most clearly set forth in 

 the third edition of Dana's Manual of Geology of 1880. 



The advances made in the past two decades in the separation 

 of the glacial drift into distinct epochs of ice advance and the 

 introduction of such a term as Wisconsin for the last series of 

 ice sheet deposits has tended among other causes to leave the 

 term Champlain as employed in Dana's Manual a synonym for 

 an ill assorted and broken up collection of facts, there remaining 

 only for its exclusive use the original marine beds of the Cham- 

 plain and St Lawrence valleys and their equivalents elsewhere, 

 for which the term was originally proposed by the Vermont 

 geologists. In this restricted sense for which a name is and 

 ever must be needed the name would be appropriate did it not 

 find itself confronted with a contest for survival by the resur- 

 rected Champlain group of the lower Silurian whose title to 

 recognition according to the law of priority which should govern 

 all scientific names is clear but whose rehabilitation must never- 

 theless, in view of the circumstances above detailed prove a source 

 of confusion. In fact to continue the use of either term from 

 now on is to involve any context in which they are introduced 

 in some obscurity. The happiest solution of the difiiculty pre- 

 sented by the present status in geology of the name Champlain 

 would appear to be to allow both applications with whatever 

 postfixes to become obsolete in geologic literature. The name of 

 Samuel de Champlain as much as we admire his high character 



