AN EOCENE FLORA IN GEORGIA AND THE INDICATED 
PHYSICAL CONDITIONS: 
EDWARD W. BERRY 
(WITH TWO FIGURES) 
Eocene plants have been thus far unknown along the Atlantic 
border, the most easterly known flora of this age having been that 
of the so-called Eolignitic of the Mississippi embayment, which 
while abundant is for the most part uncollected and undescribed. 
Contrasted with this paucity of eocene plants in the east, the 
western interior Eocene has a flora which in number of species 
probably exceeds the sum total of all the later tertiary floras of 
North America. There are also a number of eocene floras along 
the Pacific coast and in the far north as far as Alaska, the mouth 
of the Mackenzie River, and Greenland. : 
The following brief paper is concerned with a most interesting 
eocene flora of Claiborne age recently discovered, and studied by 
the writer in connection with the cooperative investigation of the 
coastal plain in charge of Dr. T. WAYLAND VaucHaAN of the U.S. 
Geological Survey. These notes partake of the nature of an 
abstract of this study, which will eventually be published in full 
by that organization. 
The localities are all in eastern Georgia, where there is a marked 
transgression of the Claiborne sediments, burying all traces of 
_ Upper Cretaceous or earlier Eocene deposits and coming to rest 
upon beds of Lower Cretaceous age or even in some instances upon 
the crystalline rocks of the eastern Piedmont. The bulk of the 
plants come from the vicinity of Grovetown, about seventeen 
miles west of Augusta near the southeastern border of Columbia 
County. In this area the deposits, which consist for the most 
part of porous laminated light-colored clays alternating with beast 
beds of sand, and more rarely beds of lignite, occupy 4 pre-Claiborné 
estuary eroded in the Lower Cretaceous and outcropping a5 4 narrow 
tongue only two or three miles in width, and extending from the 
« Published by permission of the Director of the U.S. Geological Survey: 
Baniotcal Gazette, vol.5o]} 
