104 



In British Columbia there are several areas of Lignite Tertiary age, though none of these 

 are large, and they are all somewhat widely separated. These are, according to present 

 information : — 



1. Burrard inlet and Vancouver. 



2. Omineca river. 



3. Finlay river. 



4. Coal brook. 



5. Blackwater river. 



At Vancouver there is a very limited exposure from which Sir William Dawson 

 described a number of plants in 1895.1^ But on the opposite side of Burrard inlet there is 

 an area which extends southward to the Boundary Line, and along it. for a distance of 

 about fifty-four miles. This is the locality known as Burrard inlet, and from it Sir William 

 Dawson described a large number of plants, several of them new (Op. cit.). 



In 1885 (Op. cit.), Sir William Dawson was able to correlate the Burrard Inlet and Van- 

 couver floras with that from the Tertiary areas east of the Rocky mountains, as well as 

 with corresponding horizons in the United States. He had previously shown, however, ii; 

 a very convincing manner, that the entire southern area east of the mountains was of lower 

 Eocene age, equivalent to the Fort Union group of Montana and Dakota ; that the beds are 

 composed of clays and sandstones resting conformably upon Cretaceous beds of the Fort 

 Pierre and Fox Hills groups, and holding remains of plants together with lignites and shells- 

 This correlation with the Upper Laramie as established by Sir William Dawson and other 

 Canadian Qjeologists has long been recognized and accepted, and subsequent evidence has 

 not in any way served to render it otherwise than stable. 



The outlying area of the Mackenzie river was first held by Heer to be of Miocene age, 

 and the error which led to this conclusion also led him to assign to the same age the 

 Tertiary beds of Saghalien, Spitzbergen and Greenland, a misconception which he persisted 

 in adopting as late as 1880.2 But, as shown by Sir Williami Dawson on several occasions, 

 and emphasized in 1882,^ there can be no doubt whatever that all the localities thus referred' 

 to are of Laramie age. This view was not adopted by American palaeobotanists as late as 

 1898, dnce in his Catalogue of Cretaceous and Tertiary Plants published in that year by Dr.' 

 F. H. Knowlton* of the United States Geological Sarvey, he not only assigns the Mackenzie 

 river. Porcupine creek and Souris river to the Miocene, but in an account of the Fossil Flora 

 of Alaska, published in 1904,5 he refers to the Atane beds of Greenland as belonging to the 

 same horizon. In a later publication, however/' these views are materially modified, since we 

 there find the "Arctic Miocene" referred to as Upper Eocene, while the Mackenzie Riverbeds 

 are referred to the Fort Union group. Much confusion still exists as to the stratigraphical 

 position of many Tertiary plants, and it will no doubt be some time before a satisfactory 

 knowledge of their distribution is reached. 



iTrans. R. S. C, N. S. I, 1895, iv, 137-161. - ' • 



aProc. R. Soc. Lond., 18. 



STrana. R. S. C, I, 1882-83, iv, 29-30 ; N. S., I, 1895, iv, 150. 



■"U. S. Geol. Surv, Bull. 152, 1898. 



Toss. Flor. Alaska. Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., XVII, 1894, 207-240. 



^Foss. Plants from Kukak bay. Harriman Xxp., IV, 1904, 162. 



