Eastern Kansas and Nebraska. 167 
to be barren of coal—are well known facts. But to maintain 
that the Coal-measures of Northern Missouri, Iowa and Illinois 
belong to this or any lower horizon, to say nothing of those of 
the other States mentioned, beneath which the Millstone grit is 
80 well developed, is to state a proposition the fallacy of which 
18 manifest to all who have studied these rocks with even a mod- 
erate degree of care. In the first place, the whole physical 
oal-measures of the Mississippi valley occupy precisely the 
same horizon as those of Europe. Here, as there, we have first, 
from four to five hundred feet in thickness beneath the Coal- 
measures of Southern Illinois,® thins out in a north-westerly di- 
aca so that, farther north in Illinois, in Iowa and Missouri, 
s ; 
flora alone would be sufficient to settle this question. Lesque 
eux, who was especially commissioned to study the fossil plants 
most of the Western States, containing Upper Carboniferous 
Tocks, including Illinois, says, “if we admit the generic distribu- 
t 
_. been attempted, either before or after him), all the European 
Setera, even the undefined genus Aphilebia Sternb., have repre- 
* Mr : : inois State Geographical Survey, gives 
a thi Sena “sone empire at five hundred feet, and giv 
— showing it to rest upon the upper imedes Limestone group, everywhere 
regarded as the upper member of the Subcarboniferous or Mountain Limestone 
“ies. (Trans. Acad. Sci., St. Louis, Nov. 1862, p-188.) 
