498 GEOLOGY OF OHIO. 



the Bedford shales in the northern tier of counties shows the fallacy of 

 seeking exact parallelism of strata or faunae originating under such 

 diverse physical conditions. 



In July, 1865, Professor Alexander Winchell undertook a comparison 

 of the faunas of the various formations supposed to be the western equiv- 

 alents of the Chemung of New York, and found to his astonishment that 

 not a single species out of about 175 forms collected in Ohio, Iowa, Michi- 

 gan and Illinois proved identifiable with Chemung species. He says 

 "In the light of these identifications, and in the absence of all identifi- 

 cations between western species and those of the Chemung, as well as 

 between the species of this so-called Chemung conglomerate and those 

 of the Chemung, it might not seem unreasonable to doubt its affinities 

 with recognized Chemung rocks and to suspect its continuity with the 

 supposed Carboniferous conglomerate until observation shall have dem- 

 onstrated that its stratigraphical position is really below that formation- 

 And further, since we must probably abandon the attempt to coordinate 

 the Chemung of New York with the fossiliferous portions of the sand- 

 stones and shales of the west lying between the 'Black slate' and the Coal 

 conglomerate, it seems not unlikely that we may yet be able to prove the 

 conglomerate of Western New York to be the attenuated and littoral pro- 

 longation of those western sandstones and shales — at least of the supe- 

 rior and fossiliferous portions of them, so that the latter would stand as a 

 hitherto unrecognized group of strata lying at the very base of the Car- 

 boniferous system, while the Chemung rocks of New York fall within 

 the Devonian system, toward which the writer is now inclined to think 

 that their paleontological affinities attract them." 



In 1866 Professor Winchell made a brief survey of Knox and Co- 

 shocton counties in company with Professor Newberry, and reported that 

 several of the Waverly species were known to extend into the Coal Meas- 

 ures, and therefore suggested that the "chocolate shales" (estimated thick- 

 ness 534 feet) are the equivalent of the Portage and Chemung. The 

 chocolate shales here referred to embrace the Bedford, Berea, Cuyahoga 

 and Waverly shales of my own reports. 



Professor Winchell is therefore to be credited with the first attempt 

 to separate an upper, sandy (Logan) group as Carboniferous in faunal 

 characters from a lower shaly, Devonian portion. 



On the other hand, the attempt to definitely parallelize the upper 

 Waverly with the Catskill group of New York may be said, in the light 

 of our present knowledge, to have proven quite futile. 



In 1866 Professor Hall again insisted on the Chemung age of the 

 Waverly and his conclusions were so generally accepted as to close, for 

 the time, all discussion of the subject. 1 



In 1869, however, Professor Winchell again resumed the discussion 

 a nd published in th e Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 



1 Trans. American Philosophical Society, 1866, p. 246. 



