131 



No. 4 to the " Narrative " of this expedition, gives a general description 

 of some " Orthocerata of a peculiar kind" collected near the First and 

 Second Rocky Points on the north-west shore of Lake Winnipeg, where 

 similar specimens had previously been collected by Richardson, and says 

 that from this locality " there is also one specimen, which, though not in 

 good preservation, is doubtless a Catenipora, or chain coral, a genus 

 characteristic of the older transition limestones, in which beds also Ortho- 

 cerata are common." 



Up to the year 1851, the limestones of Lake Winnipeg were regarded, 

 at least by some geologists, as of Carboniferous age, for Edwards & 

 Haime, in their " Monographie des Polypiers Fossiles des Terrains 

 Paleozoiques," published in that year, described and figured a fossil 

 coral from Lake Winnipeg as a Carboniferous species, under the name 

 Lithostrotion Stokesi. But, in the first volume of the Journal of a Boat 

 Voyage through Rupert's Land to the Arctic Sea, published also in 

 1851, Richardson states that the whole of the coast on the north-west 

 side of Lake Winnipeg is occupied by the Black River limestone. No 

 reasons are given for this statement, but a little further on in the same 

 volume the occurrence of a species of Receptaculiies, supposed by Dr. S. 

 P. Woodward to be closely related to the R. Neptuni of Defrance, and 

 of large Orthocerata at Pine Island Lake, are said to point to the exist- 

 ence of the Birdseye and Trenton limestones in that neighbourhood. 

 The Recejytaculites of the Winnipeg limestones, which Etheridge sub- 

 sequently identified with S. occidentalis, Salter, in Palliser's Report and 

 in Sir James Hector's paper " On the Geology of the Country between 

 Lake Superior and the Pacific Ocean,"* is now known to be, not that 

 species, but the R. Oweni, Hall, of the Galena limestone. 



During the Canadian exploring expedition to the Assiniboine and 

 Saskatchewan, in 1858, in charge of Professor Henry Youle Hind, the 

 party made a geological survey of the west coast of Lake Winnipeg from 

 Deer Island to Cat Head. They examined the rock exposures at Deer 

 Island, Grindstone Point, Punk Island, Limestone Cave Point, and Cat 

 Head, and collected a few fossils at each of these localities. In the 

 ofiicial Report upon this expedition, published at Toronto in 1859, it is 

 stated that " the formations which have been recognized on Lake Winni- 

 peg and in the valley of Red River are the Chazy, Bird's-eye and Trenton 

 formations and the Hudson River group." "Fine exposures of the Chazy 

 formation" are said "to occur on Punk Island and along the west coast 

 north of Big Grindstone Point as far as the Cat Head ;" Sir John Rich- 

 ardson is quoted as the authority for the statement that the whole of the 



* Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. XVIII., p. 426, 

 London, April, 1861. 



