Crosby and Barton—Carboniferous in Massachusetts. 417 
a wide area of conglomerate, extending to the limits of the 
basin. This great development of conglomerate was regarded 
by Hitchcock as underlying the coal strata, and as probably of 
Silurian age. While the stratified rocks lying to the northwest 
of the anthracite belt, and composing the attenuated Norfolk 
County basin, were finally referred provisionally by this dis- 
tinguished geologist, and mainly upon lithological grounds, to 
the Devonian system, and Sir Charles Lyell, ina paper on the 
Worcester Anthracite,* appears to concur in this conclusion. 
Of the former, if not the present, existence of Cambrian 
(Lower Silurian) strata in the Narragansett basin there can be 
but little doubt, since pebbles holding Primordial fossils—Sco- 
lithus and Lingula—are of common occurrence in the conglom- 
erate at Newport, Fall River and Taunton; and yet this great 
conglomerate itself is now generally and, as we think, justly 
regarded as essentially a part of the Carboniferous series. at 
all previous determinations of the age of the Norfolk County 
eds have rested on insufficient evidence is obvious; and to 
cerning the horizon of this belt, it having been referred by dif- 
from their color, red sandstones and shales occupying a peer 
i i i their 
communication of the two basins in either ae or present 
time. The Norfolk County beds are extensively folded, show- 
ing at most points high, and often vertical, dips; but in this re- 
spect they are as little contrasted with the Carboniferous on the 
one hand as with the Primordial on the other. In the almost 
and from those of Hitchcock, consists essentially, beginning at 
the base, of the following groups of rocks: 
_ (L.) A great thickness of conglomerate, which, at the bottom, 
is sometimes extremely coarse and irregular, holding bowlders 
* Jour. Geol. Soe. London, vol. i. 
Am. Jour. see ae Srertes, Vou. XX, No. 119.—Noyv., 1880. 
