E. W. Hilgard — Old Tertiary of the Southwest. 267 



Dr. Meyer commits a fundamental error of judgment in an- 

 other matter, namely, in the assumption that after Lyell, Con- 

 rad and Tuomey had issued their (well grounded) dicta in 

 regard to the succession of the Tertiary stages, those following 

 them in the investigation of the subject calmly took these 

 things for granted, and made their observations conform to 

 " the masters' words." Here again, Dr. Meyer assumes a state 

 of affairs which not long ago was widely prevalent in the old 

 world, but has not, within my recollection, been a fault of 

 American observers. On the contrary, young men have rather 

 tended to distinguish themselves by making startling discov- 

 eries of mistakes in the work of their predecessors, and have 

 left nothing unchallenged and unverified. Contrary to Dr. 

 Meyer's expressed opinion of my method of work in Missis- 

 sippi (see his paper in July number, page 65), I was even then 

 sufficiently Americanized to subject every point of my prede- 

 cessors' work and conclusions to the closest and most elaborate 

 scrutiny, as he would have found out had he done me the 

 honor to study my report. Hence I have no comment to 

 make on his historical presentation of the growth of opinions, 

 except that those opinions served me merely as convenient 

 working hypotheses. But I differ from him more fundament- 

 ally in his sweeping statement (Ibid.), that "only a competent 

 and careful examination of the fossils could indicate the rela- 

 tions of the Old-tertiary strata of Mississippi," and that I 

 "studied this Tertiary paleootology very little." I had not 

 time, it is true, for a thorough study of all the forms occurring 

 in the several stages ; and it is also true that under pressure of 

 work, I " transferred the making of the lists of fossils to Prof. 

 "W". D. Moore." But every one of these fossils had been col- 

 lected by myself personally, and in so doing I had acquired a 

 very competent knowledge of the leading fossils of each of the 

 stages; it had also convinced me of the fact that Conrad had 

 made a large number of spurious species, and that the several 

 stages are intimately interconnected by community of species 

 from Claiborne to Yicksburg. This conviction I have repeat- 

 edly expressed in my Mississippi report, and it is emphasized 

 by the list of fossils from the "Red Bluff" locality, which 

 shows an obvious transition from the Jackson to the Yicksburg 

 fauna. But it, as well as a great many other observations, also 

 emphasized the extreme localization of certain fossils and groups 

 of fossils; a circumstance easily accounted for by the shallow- 

 ness of the depositing sea, evidenced not only in the materials 

 and littoral fauna, but in the constant recurrence of brackish 

 and lignitic facies where, stratigraphically, the continuation of 

 marine beds was to be expected. This made me extremely 

 cautious in relying on any single or few fossils for the identifi- 



