Keyes—Stratigraphy of the Kansas Coal Measures. 241 
Coal Measures there is abundant evidence of many minor oscil- 
lations and special attention has been called* to a number of 
them. With the existence of such conditions as these the 
present dips lose much of their significance. . 
The important point is not so much the absolute dip but the 
slant of the strata with reference to the Coal Measure floor. 
When this is taken into consideration it doubtless will be found 
that the estimates usually placed upon the thickness of the Coal 
Measures are excessive, and that the common figures, which for 
Missouri have been 2000 feet and now for Kansas some 2800 
feet, are doubtless very much too great. As evidence of this a 
diamond drill core taken out of a well at Kansas City showed a 
typical mica schist at a depth of 2400 feet, indicating that the 
entire Paleozoic had been passed through at about 2300 feet 
below the base of the Upper Coal Measures at that point. 
It may be coneluded from what has just been said, from the 
data presented in the two recent papers on the Kansas Coal 
Measures, and from what is known of the field relations of the 
Carboniferous formations in western Missouri and southeastern 
Kansas, that the four arguments in the article mentioned, 
which are set against the explanations offered for the deposi- 
tion of the Coal Measures in the eastern and larger part of the 
basin, are not only invalid but the evidence itself upon which 
they rest disproves them. Viewed in the proper light, the 
Kansas rocks present identically the same stratigraphic features 
as do those of Missouri and Lowa. 
Regarding the subdivisionst of the Coal Measures, it is of 
interest to learn that the same line of division has been inde- 
pendently adopted in Kansas which had been proposed a short 
time previously in [owa and Missouri. Instead of a different 
classification for each state and a different dividing line for 
each locality, perhaps, the present selection now makes the sub- 
divisions uniform for the whole Western Interior coal basin. 
The objections raisedt to the diagrams representing the 
stratigraphy of the Coal Measures in Iowa§ are not so serious, 
nor the ideas which are graphically represented such wide depar- 
tures from the commonly accepted views, as the Kansas author 
has stated. In fact the attention is called to a certain class of 
phenomena which are, unfortunately, too frequently overlooked 
in stratigraphical work. The manifest object of the diagram- 
matic representation in the Iowa reports is to show that while 
* Iowa Geol. Sur., vols. i and ii; also Bull. Geol. Soc. America, vol. ii, pp. 277- 
242, 1891. 
+ Haworth: Division of the Kansas Coal Measures, Kansas Univ. Quart., vol. 
iii, pp. 291-295; Lawrence, 1895. 
t Kansas Univ. Quart., vol. iii, p. 291; Lawrence, 1895. 
§ Iowa Geol. Sur., vol. i, pp. 117-118; Des Moines, 1893; also ibid., vol. ii, 
pp. 161-162; Des Moines, 1894. 
