170 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



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General remarks on the conglomerates 



One is struck with the absence in the Perce region of the great 

 thickness of the rusty brown Gaspe sandstones which at Little Gaspe 

 rest conformably on the limestones and at Gaspe Basin carry marine 

 fossils. Doubtless we are to find the contemporary of these deposits 

 in the red and white sandstones of Perce, but they are only feebly 

 developed and to them as an equivalent of the work elsewhere done, 

 we must add some part of the conglomerate series. We follow 

 ideas before expressed in regard to the tremendous deposits of the 

 Gaspe sandstone, as sediments laid down first along an embayed 

 coast and eventually in a deep coastal estuary which received heavy 

 drainage from an elevated and rapidly decaying land surface. That 

 estuary may have extended far to the southeast and at times it 

 appears to have been shut off from the ocean entirely by the upbuild- 

 ing of bars across its mouth but it was virtually and for long periods 

 a coastal lagoon subject to inroads from without in times of stress. 



Then was the period of Old Red lakes in New York, in Scotland, 

 Orkney and Russia. They did not all begin at the same period of 

 time nor continue their existence for equal times ; some began in the 

 late Siluric, others in middle Devonic, several are known to have 

 continued their existence beyond the Devonic and into the Carbonic. 

 So here,^ we are disposed to believe, this peculiar mode of sedimenta- 

 tion has transcended the limits of Devonic time and entered the Car- 

 bonic, though we have no traces of marine life of either period after 

 the deposition was once established. The conglomerates of eastern 

 Gaspe are contrasted with the sandstones of the more westerly parts .^ 

 of the county, and we may interpret them as the deposits of the 

 seaward ends of the long estuary where for countless time the waters 

 of the sea beat, as today, on the upturned edges of the ancient lime 

 stone cliffs and rolled their fragments up along the margin of an ever 

 sinking continent. 



Conclusion 



From the future detailed study of the faunas preserved in this 

 series of Siluric and Devonic limestones, we may expect a flood of 

 light on the significance of contemporaneous faunas in the northern 



