REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I914 1 33 



Meyer, Loewe and Holtedahl, who have worked out the paleon- 

 tologic factors of this Devonic succession, have demonstrated a 

 highly developed series beginning with an actual representation of 

 the calcareous members, the Keyser (or introductory unit, of the 

 Maryland succession), the Coeymans and New Scotland members 

 of the Helderberg, and so on upward with a final Devonic member 

 carrying terrestrial plants in a continental sediment. 



These important discoveries compel us once more to reconstruct 

 the paleogeographic map, for the most obvious conclusion derived 

 from these data is the direct and immediate connection of fairly 

 deep arctic marine waters with the interior seas of Appalachia. 

 The Siluric bay, which has been made to reach its long way south- 

 ward from the Arctic into the interior and has been conceived to 

 have brought thence its faunas, reached up rather than down, and 

 its waters were not shrunken at the close of the Siluric by a northern 

 positive movement of the land. Palpably, as Doctor Meyer has sug- 

 gested, the Devonic water way to the north must have been wide 

 open all about these western and northwestern shores of the great 

 Laurentia ; and if the Devonic strata fail to appear there in the 

 interval between New York, southern Ontario and Ellesmere-land, 

 it is either because their remains still lie unrevealed or have been 

 swept away by heavy erosion. 



