206 R. T. Hill— Outlying Areas of the Comanche | 
Beds, the intervening Cretaceous deposits having there been 
denuded in early Tertiary time. 
There has been a diversity of opinion as to the age and 
affinities of the Cretaceous beds of this region. St. John* 
referred them with the overlying sandstone to the Dakota, but 
notes certain dissimilarities of structure and fauna from the 
Dakota as he had seen it elsewhere. 
Prof. Robert Hayft has pointed out their dissimilarity to 
other outcrops of the Cretaceous, and while judiciously not 
committing himself, said : 
‘With reserve, we are inclined to place the stratum called 
the shell bed in the Fort Benton group. . . . Before giving up 
the Dakota age of the sandstones (one bed in particular) I 
will have to re-examine the region.” 
In a later paper,t after reviewing subsequent discoveries he 
says: “There seems no doubt but that they belong to lower 
horizons than the Kansas Dakota. There is no reason why 
the Texas names given to the beds [by Prof. Cragin,| Trinity 
for the lower sandstone, and Comanche Peak for the upper, 
should not be permanent.” 
Prof. Cragin has written more voluminously upon the region 
and its formation than any other writer, and he it was who 
first brought out the important fact that a portion of the beds 
were of pre-Dakota age,$ and belonged to the lower-lying 
Comanche Series which has its typical development in central 
Texas. ; 
It is impossible in this short paper to give all the reference 
to Prof. Cragin’s age determination of these beds, but in 
general he has classified the Cretaceous deposits into three con- 
spicuous divisions: a basal member which he has named the 
Cheyenne sandstone ; a group of intermediate shales which he 
has until lately called the Neocomian shales, and recently 
terms the Kiowa shales, and an upper sandstone which he calls 
the Dakota. He has correlated the Cheyenne sandstone with 
the Trinity sands of Texas and Arkansas, and the Kiowa shales 
with the Fredericksburg division, and the Dakota with the 
Dakota. Furthermore, he has generally spoken of the shales 
as the “ Neocomian shales of Kansas.” As a result of this 
classification, the Dakota sandstone was supposed in Kansas to 
rest directly on the beds of the Fredericksburg division, with- 
out ne interposition of the sediments of the Washita sub- 
epoch. 
* Kansas State Board of Agriculture, Fifth Biennial Report, Part II, pp. 
142-144, Topeka, 1887. 
+ Bull. 57, U.S. Geol. Survey, 1890, pp. 29-30. 
Geology and Mineral Resources of Kansas, Topeka, 1893, pp. 12-13. 
$ See Bull. Washburn Lakoratory of Natural History, vol. i, No. 3, vol. ii, Nos. 
9,10, 11. American Geologist, July, 1894, ete. 
