78 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



I 



is an arrested Caledofdan chain ; I mean to say by that, a branch 

 of the great chain of northern Scotland, of a Httle later date than 

 the Scottish stock. It is with the Highlands of Scotland that the 

 old Newfoundland mountains seem to me to be in agreement. 



Here, as there, upon the partly leveled Caledonian folds extend, 

 transgressive and rich in coarse conglomerate, the red sandstones. 

 Those of Canada are a little more yellow than those of Scotland 

 and their highest members are of Dinantic age. These red sand- 

 stones of Canada, dated, here and there, by fishes or by plants, are 

 often nearly horizontal. The Bonaventure, the Scaumenac, the 

 Horton Bluffs formations belong to them. The so-called Windsor 

 beds (with brachiopod limestones and frequent gypsum masses) 

 seem to me to be the upper element of this complex and" incon- 

 testably Dinantic. 



After the deposition of this mantle of red sandstones, and doubt- 

 less toward the close of the Dinantic, began a new movement, of 

 slight intensity, gently displacing the coasts and producing here and 

 there lacunes and discordances in sedimentation. For over a 

 restricted area of the ancient chain, an area covering the. northeast 

 portion of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton 

 and northwestern Nova Scotia, the Westphalic is deposited almost 

 everywhere to an enormous thickness. The base of the West- 

 phalic is often designated by the name Riversdale and Union 

 formation and correlated in a broad way with the Millstone grit. 

 It incloses many beds of red sandstones or schists, and numerous 

 black schists with Leaia and Anthracomya. This group alone may 

 have a thickness of 3000 meters. The upper part is a productive 

 coal, very actively exploited at different points (Stellarton, Pictou, 

 Sydney etc.) with a thickness of 600 meters at Sydney, more than 

 2000 meters at the Joggins. It may be that the most elevated of 

 these coal beds are Stephanie. There was a new movement again, 

 a new discordance or a new formation of conglomerates in the 

 Stephanie epoch. The New Glasgow conglomerate is at the base 

 of a very heavy series of coarse conglomerates, the upper part of 

 which is Permic and which form today all of Prince Edward 

 Island and almost the whole isthmus which attaches Nova Scotia 

 to the mainland. The Trias of the Bay of Fundy which extends 

 as far as Truro, corresponds to an analogous episode, but much 

 later and affecting a region which the Permic transgression did 

 not reach. 



Trias and Permic have remained nearly horizontal. In the vast 

 Carbonic mantle, the thickness of which will reach about 4000 

 meters, there are, generally speaking, only undulations, but ac- 

 companied by truncations through faulting. The coal of Sydney 

 and Glace Bay disappears gently beneath the sea with a feeble dip 

 and a perfect regularity and the workings are boldly going forward 

 beneath the waters of the Atlantic. Nowhere have we seen tne 

 Carboniferous actually folded. It is, nevertheless, at certain points 

 in southern New Brunswick and at Pictou, but such local folds 

 are not intense, it seems, except in the early Carbonic. 



