406 PROCEEDINGS OF MONTREAL MEETING. 
over the long, unrecorded gap between the John Day and the typical 
Loup Fork, this discovery was of capital significance, and it eventually 
proved to be of great value in making correlations with the fresh-water 
deposits of the Kuropean upper Miocene. Cope may have been mis- 
taken in assigning so wide a distribution as he gave to these beds in 
Nebraska and South Dakota, but the latest observations made in that re- 
gion, while still incomplete, tend to confirm his conclusions. 
What we know of the Pliocene of the interior portion of the United 
States is almost entirely due to the labors of Cope. From his study of 
the fishes he identified certain formations in Idaho and central Oregon 
as Pliocene and proposed the name of Idaho beds for them. These 
may, however, prove to be synchronous with the lacustrine deposits 
found in Nevada by King and by him called the Truckee beds. In 
Texas, Cummins discovered certain beds lying unconformably upon the 
Loup Fork and overlaid by the Blanco, and to these he gave the un- 
fortunate name of “ Goodnight beds,” a term which has aroused the not 
unnatural mirth of our English cousins. The fossils collected in these 
beds were sent to Cope for identification, and in his skillful hands they 
were made to give the important result of characterizing the transition 
from the Loup Fork to the typical Pliocene, a result which was in com- 
plete harmony with the stratigraphical observations of Cummins. The 
Blanco formation of Texas is the most typical and unmistakable of the 
North American fresh-water Pliocenes, and almost everything that is 
known concerning it was made out by Cope. He examined the stratig- 
raphy and the geographical distribution of the beds, described all the 
fossils which have so far been discovered in them, and determined their 
position in the geological column. 
In the Pleistocene, Cope accomplished a great amount of work in de- 
termining the successive mammalian faunas, a knowledge of which will 
go far toward establishing the divisions of the North American Pleisto- 
cene upon a sound basis. This work was done not only in the Sheridan 
beds (the so-called Equus beds) of the west and southwest, which he 
studied over vast areas and in widely separated localities, but also in the 
caverns of the east. His attention had been very early attracted toward 
this fascinating subject of cave faunas, and one of the last works of his 
life was an elaborate study of the very extensive collections made in the 
Port Kennedy bone cave in Pennsylvania, under the auspices of the 
Academy of Natural Sciences, a cavern which had years before yielded 
the materials for some of his earliest investigations in this line. No- 
where else on this continent has so varied and extensive an assemblage 
of Pleistocene vertebrates been discovered as at Port Kennedy, and it is 
devoutly to be hoped that the Academy may speedily publish Cope’s 
