200 THE DEVONIAN AND CARBONIFEROUS. [bull. 80. 



Academy of Science, Philadelphia, the undoubted occurrence of Per- 

 mian fossils in the white limestone of the Guadalupe Mountains, New 

 Mexico, was announced. The collection consists of forty species, part 

 of which are identical with the Permian forms of England and Eussia. 

 Below this limestone is a sandstone containing the same fossils found 

 in the same formation in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, "but in New 

 Mexico scarcely a single species ranges from the Coal Measures into 

 the Permian." 



Sir Roderick Murchison, 1 in a letter to the editors of the American 

 Journal, expresses his surprise at the statement made by Mr. Marcou 

 with regard to the term Permian, as given by Murchison, for the strata 

 of the government of Perm, which term he considered a very improper 

 one, and also that Murchison has included in his Permian a part, if 

 not the whole, of the Trias. 



Considering this a serious charge, Murchison asked an explanation 

 of Marcou of the grounds upon which it was made, and this was finally 

 given in the memoir noticed in this letter. Murchison objected strongly 

 to criticisms upon his work by one who had never been in Russia, 

 spoke of the absolute distinction between the fossils of the Permian 

 group and those of the Trias, whether we refer to the reptiles, fishes, 

 and shells, or to the plants, but Mr. Marcou unites these two deposits 

 in one natural group under the name of New Red sandstone. 



The author concludes by requesting the editors to translate into En- 

 glish the last page of Mr. Marcou's memoir, considering it the best 

 argument against the adoption of that gentleman's views that could 

 be produced. 



The editors gave the summary referred to, in which Mr. Marcou re- 

 gards the New Red sandstone, comprising the Dyas and Trias, as a 

 great geologic period equivalent to the Paleozoic epoch, the Carbon- 

 iferous, Mesozoic, etc., and says that he restricts the limits ordinarily 

 given to the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, and gives them proportions more 

 in harmony with those of the Tertiary and recent epoch, in order to 

 have a well balanced and natural classification. He considers the Car- 

 boniferous forms of* life found in the lower beds of the •• New Red" as 

 a kind of rear guard to the preceding organisms, and the forms found 

 in the upper beds as precursors or advance guard of the Mesozoic pop- 

 ulations. 



In 1859, Messrs. Meek and Hayden acknowledge their mistake 2 in 

 having placed certain rocks of Kansas on a parallel with No. 1 of Ne- 

 braska section, having ascertained by their fossils, which are similar 

 to the Permian of the Old World, that these rocks should be placed 

 lower, and the same was done with the lower 200 feet of Mr. Marcou's 



1 Murchison, Sir Roderick J. : Notice of a memoir by M. Jules Marcou, entitled " Dy.is and Trias, 

 or tbo New Red Sandstone in Europe, North America and India." Am. Jour. Sci., vol. 28, 1859, pp. 

 256-259. 



2 Meek, F. B., and F. V. Hayden: On the so-called Triassic rooks of Kansas and Nebraska. Am. 

 Jow. Sci., vol. 27, 1859, pp. 31-36. 



