Fig. 2.—General Section from the Rocky Mountains to Cypress Hills. 
W. 
Rock 
8. Saskatchewan 
Ve. 
ountains. 
Cypress Hills. 
river. 
Porcupine Hills. 
M 
Pierre Series. Belly-river Series. 
Laramie Series. 
a. Miocene. 
The dark bands indicate the horizons of Coal and Lignite. 
ON THE GEOLOGY OF THE 
principally of coniferous wood, having 
the texture of a bright hard lignite 
approaching to the characters of true 
bituminous coal, and affording a valu- 
able fuel. Beds of this character are 
very extensively distributed over the 
region*. The shales associated with 
the coals hold many vegetable frag- 
ments; but no well-characterized spe- 
cimens were obtained, though there 
were abundant indications of forests 
of angiospermous and gymnospermous 
trees. Better-preserved remains of 
them, obtained from other sections, 
will be found referred to in a paper by 
the writer in the ‘ Transactions of the 
Royal Society of Canada’ (vol. i. 
1883). 
These beds at Medicine Hat are 
believed, on stratigraphical evidence, 
by the officers of the Geological Survey 
to be below the Ft. Pierre group, and 
therefore probably of Cenomanian 
age; yet in lithological character they 
have a very close.resemblance to the 
Laramie beds; and even their fossils, 
so far as known, are scarcely distin- 
sulshable from those of the upper 
series, both holding shells of the same 
genera. They would seem to occupy 
the top of a flat anticlinal, on both 
sides of which are seen beds a little 
higher in the series. 
About twenty miles east of Medicine 
Hat, at Ross’s Creek, some of the next 
beds in ascending order occur, and are 
believed to belong to the Pierre series. 
They are light-coloured marls and clays 
with Ammonites, Cytherea, and bones 
of fish and Dinosaurs; above these 
are gypseous clays; and, still higher, 
brownish shales holding a bed of 
lignite. 
West of the localities above de- 
scribed, similar Cretaceous beds occupy 
the country nearly to the base of the 
mountains (fig. 2) ; and beds of coal, some 
* See map by Dr. G. M. Dawson, and Re- 
port on Bow and Belly Coal Fields. Geolo- 
gical Survey of Canada, 1883. 
