INVESTIGATIONS OF CAMPBELL, MENDENHALL, AND WHITE 121 



work to solve the Kanawha problems, and this work he performed in 



1884. 



Investigations by David White 



After this complete surrender by Messrs Campbell and Mendenhall, 

 they evidently turned the puzzle which proved too thorny for them over 

 to Dr David White, the eminent palseobotanist of the National Museum 

 and of the U. S. Geological Survey, who at the Washington meeting of 

 our Society in 1899 read his paper, " Relative ages of the Kanawha and 

 Allegheny series as indicated by the fossil plants,"* in which the prob- 

 lem of the black flint and of the Kanawha coals was attacked with the 

 aid of paleobotany alone. His conclusions are in entire disagreement 

 with mine. The stratigrapher and palaeobotanist, each striving to dis- 

 cover the truth, have attained results diametrically opposed. David 

 White places the black flint near the base of the Allegheny formation. 

 The writer places it just above the top of the same. Hence the dis- 

 agreement is vital, and one conclusion or the other is completely in 

 error. It is a self-evident corollary that one or the other of us should 

 revise his published statements, since it is not creditable to our science 

 that its votaries attacking the same problem by two different paths 

 should find themselves so widely apart in their conclusions that one 

 of them has evidently missed the road entirely. 



Concerning one of these warriors in behalf of science, I will gladly 

 testify that he is brave, untiring, and honest, but in this case not suffi- 

 ciently vigilant, since he was invading a new country characterized by 

 exceptional conditions and environment (rapid subsidence and greatly 

 thickened deposits), with which his old and trusty guides (fossil plants) 

 were unfamiliar, and hence they piloted their general in the wrong direc- 

 tion — into confusion instead of order, into error instead of truth. 



I do not call into question any of Dr David White's facts or plant iden- 

 tifications, for his skill and knowledge in paleobotany are beyond criti- 

 cism, but only the interpretation of his facts in dealing with the problems 

 of stratigraphy. 



Recent Investigations by the Writer 

 method employed and area covered 



As already stated, my original conclusions concerning the place of the 

 black flint were founded on the complete harmon}^ of the stratigraphic 

 column with the widely studied series in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, 



♦Published in Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, vol. xi, pages 145-178. 



