REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I914 II7 



and northern France, added confirmatory evidence for the new in- 

 terpretation, but still Kayser's correlation for the " Lower Helder- 

 berg" of New York remained obviously based on literature only. 

 In those days an intimation of this kind coming from Germany to 

 America, for the time being was lost. Under the best of conditions 

 it takes years for the suggestion of a foreign literature to percolate 

 into the counsels of the coworker in a different language. In 1878 

 and those years, few American geologists of influence knew any- 

 thing about the German language or of German geology, and 

 Kayser's suggestions, so far as New York was concerned, fell on 

 dull ears. Ten years passed before the evidence of the Devonic age 

 of the Helderberg formation was summarized in detail and set 

 forth in a New York publication, and even then it was presented in 

 tentative form. The writer was responsible for this presentation. 

 His chief in the geological service of New York, the distinguished 

 James Hall, was so absolutely hostile to the suggested interpretation 

 that, in order to even secure publication for this array of evidence, 

 it became necessary to change a positive argument into a neutral 

 statement of facts and all conclusions into queries. But for New 

 York and America the " Hercyn-frage " became the " Helderberg 

 question," thenceforth quietly but effectively argued with intensive 

 massing of the facts, in which a strong part was taken by Schuchert, 

 until in 1908, twenty years after the effective proposition was made, 

 the Helderberg formation with the profuse lime-faunas of all its 

 subdivisions save that at the base, was formally incorporated into 

 the Devonic, in a revision of the New York classification by Mr 

 Schuchert and the writer ; and there it seems likely to remain. 



The embarrassments which involved the acceptance of this ap- 

 parently simple proposition were, in actual structure and fact, more 

 weighty in effect than was the widespread and outspoken antagonism 

 in Europe to Kayser's proposition. Here there were few parties 

 of interest and here the succession from the Siluric upward was 

 unbroken, either by erosion or disconformity. 



In both countries the abstraction of the Helderberg equivalents 

 meant a paring down of the Murchisonian conception of the Siluric, 

 which, through Murchison's personal intervention, had been deeply 

 engrafted on Hall's construction of the Siluric here. This procedure 

 was of serious import, and a consequence has been, for New York 

 anyway, a reduction of the Siluric (Upper Siluric) to its lowest 

 terms, that is to say, practically a reduction to its Wenlock equiva- 

 lent (Niagaran), supplemented below by heavy local sands, and 

 above by local developments due to the peculiar geography which 



