PALEONTOLOGIC CONTRIBUTIONS 2/ 



They pass over the knots and appear drawn together on them. 

 The knots are about 17 to 20 mm apart and about 7 wrinkles are 

 counted in 10 mm. 



Horizon and locality. Portage (Ithaca) beds near Ithaca, N. Y., 

 from a quarry one-quarter of a mile southeast of the fairground. 



Remarks. The fossil is preserved as an impression only and the 

 figure is taken from a paris-plaster cast, in order to obtain the 

 presumable exterior view. The other side was not obtained. The 

 specimen lies on a bedding plane in a gray sandstone and projects 

 with the surface shown above or below the plane. The margin is 

 not perfect and it is obvious that the disk extended a little farther 

 out. The knots are filled with the gray sandstone matrix, and on 

 breaking this away one finds that there is no test substance but 

 only a colored surface left. In several places the casts of the knots 

 give the impression, by the drawing together of the folds and the 

 presence of an apical spot where the matrix when broken away will 

 furnish no surface, of a contracted aperture or opening of some 

 kind. 



While at first glance this specimen might suggest the basal epi- 

 theca of a coral, perhaps of a compound tetracoral with rootlets, or 

 of a Favosites, the Ithaca beds, as all Portage beds, are notably free 

 from corals, and moreover the specimen itself leaves no doubt that 

 there was no thick calcareous test that would have been dissolved 

 out. There is little doubt that this was a gelatinous or chitinous 

 body leaving nothing but the colored surface and an interior filling 

 with matrix, very much like the Paropsonema. The specimen 

 further has all the appearance of a body shrunken and wrinkled 

 before entombment. It is therefore quite possible that we have 

 before us an organism related to Paropsonema and exhibiting its 

 lower surface, especially since the fossil comes from the same 

 formation (Portage.) though of another province (Ithaca) than 

 the Naples form, Paropsonema ; and also the suggestion of Doctor 

 Van Name, the zoologist of the State Museum, that the specimen 

 is the remains of a compound soft coral and the knots are closed 

 and contracted apertures of polyps, has much to commend itself. 



Pleurocystites squamosus (Billings) 

 mut. matutina nov. 



Plate 5, figures 1-4 



The main purpose of this note is to record the occurrence in the 

 rocks of New York of a highly aberrant genus of cystids, hitherto 

 reported in America only from Canada and Kentucky. The speci- 



