REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I914 121 



gastropods particularly, have specific resemblances and indentities 

 with the described species of the Hamilton (Middle Devonic) sand- 

 shales of New York. I have so interpreted them. The sugges- 

 tion, however, has been made by Professor Williams that the 

 species of pelecypods find striking semblances among the species 

 of the Coblentzian. We may be sure this is so, for there 

 are similitudes running throughout the pelecypod faunas of 

 the Devonic which are actually a hindrance rather than a help 

 to the determination of specific values. I think, however, that the 

 careful consideration of the Gaspe sandstone marine species can 

 leave no doubt of their later than Oriskany age, even without the evi- 

 dence from the stratigraphy. Then, further, as long ago shown by 

 Logan and in detail by Dawson, these sandstones on Gaspe bay carry 

 a profuse terrestrial flora of unquestionable Middle Devonic age. We 

 have then here in the Gaspe bay region the singular phenomenon of 

 a highly calcareous " Oriskany " whose lower beds carry the typical 

 species of that fauna and in whose higher limestones there are 

 still commanding representations of the fauna with additions of a 

 later (Onondaga) type, followed above by heavy sands wherein are 

 still surviving species of the Oriskany, themselves autocthonic, but 

 enmeshed in an assemblage of post-Oriskany and post-Onondaga 

 age. The fact is that with the introduction of the Gaspe sandstone 

 begins the deposition of a widespread delta on whose outer fringe 

 only, here and there, has a rather depauperated marine fauna been 

 able to subsist, while the shoreward beds received the outwash of 

 the land with its debris from the Devonic jungles. The evident 

 adjustment of the '' Oriskany " species to a gravelly bottom and in 

 their proper place in the succession, is shown, for Gaspe, in a single 

 known band in the Perce cliffs. 



The extraordinary concurrence of the primitive Appalachian 

 topography of the Maritime Provinces with that of today. The 

 bays and endroits of the present Gaspe coast, like the bays and 

 shores of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, are the synclines and 

 flanks of the Appalachian folds. Overridden in part by horizontal 

 deposits in the late Devonic, the Carbonic and Permic of post- 

 Appalachia, they have come again above the waterline by elevation 

 and erosion and now conform the coast line and the continent to 

 their ancient curves. The apparent return after the ages to the 

 forms of so distant a past is in northern Gaspe not that, but the 

 simple retention of the original form. Gaspe bay lies in a syncline 

 as old as the Appalachian system and, in less degree, so do the 



