268 E. TF! Hilgard—Old Tertiary of the Southwest. 



cation of stages in distant localities ; and similar caution would 

 have prevented Dr. Me3'er from coming to many false conjec- 

 tures on insufficient premises. 



It is difficult to characterize in terms altogether courteous Dr. 

 Meyer's supposititious account of my mode of constructing my 

 geological map of the formations of Mississippi (Ibid.) ; for he 

 had before him, in print, the record of the localities through 

 which the lines were drawn, and in stating that I made the 

 acute southward curve of the Vicksburg belt around Jackson 

 simply by way of getting out of a difficulty engendered by a 

 hasty adoption of my predecessors' views, he states what the 

 printed record shows to be false. This curve is necessitated 

 by the occurrence of characteristic Vicksburg fossils in the 

 following localities : Brownsville, Marshall's Quarry, Byram, 

 German Berry's (then Monterey Post Office), Brandon ; and no 

 other delineation is possible. How is it that with these obser- 

 vations plainly in the text before him, and with the results of 

 his own examinations at Jackson itself, it did not occur to him 

 to walk down Pearl Eiver nine miles, as I did, to see the 

 Jackson strata sinking out of view, to be replaced, first by 

 brackish and more or less lignitiferous deposits, which in their 

 turn sink out of view and are capped by the Yicksburg rocks 

 in their most characteristic development, in a magnificently 

 fossiliferous outcrop two miles long ? How does Dr. Meyer 

 expect that in a level or merely rolling country, underlaid by 

 strata having a dip not exceeding ten feet per mile, he will 

 ever see stages separated by strata sixty or seventy feet in 

 thickness exposed in any one outcrop? and in the present case, 

 is any fossil whatsoever needed to establish the order of super- 

 position ? 



There are at least two other lines of section across the Ter- 

 tiary belt of Mississippi, in which the order is just as plainly- 

 established by stratigraphy alone, independently of fossils, as it 

 is on Pearl Eiver. One of these lines lies along the Yazoo 

 Bluff from Carrollton via Vicksburg down to Grand Gulf ; the 

 other from Meridian via Enterprise and Quitman down to 

 Winchester, on the Chickasawhay Eiver. The former section 

 has been completely explored between Professor E. A. Smith 

 (then my assistant) and myself; the latter was in the first place 

 traversed by myself, by land, and then, to make assurance 

 doubly sure, and in order to observe details, the entire trip was 

 made in a canoe by Professor George Little, later State Geolo- 

 gist of Georgia and now at the University of Mississippi. In 

 all cases alike, going down streams flowing to the southward, the 

 strata successively sink below the water's edge as the observer pro- 

 gresses, in the order Claiborne, Jackson, Vicksburg, Grand Gulf, 

 as identified by their leading fossils. If then, there is any 



