Geology and Mineralogy. 397 



a length of five inches, and may be three-fourths of the whole 

 animal. It is distorted and somewhat obscure in its markings, 

 but appears to be a true fossil. The pipestone beds have been re- 

 garded as Huronian. They now are placed with the earlier Pri- 

 mordial. Prof. Winchell observes that, in several deep wells that 

 have been drilled in central and southeastern Minnesota, a great 

 thickness of red and green shales have been reached which may 

 be of the same formation. He adds that red gneisses, felsytes 

 and porphyritic felsytes in Wisconsin overlie the red quartzytes 

 and are therefore brought within the Primordial zone. 



The report contains also a paper by Prof. N". H.' Winchell on 

 the crystalline rocks of the Northwest, the same paper that he 

 presented to the Philadelphia meeting of the American Associa- 

 tion. The author becomes quite earnest in his defense of Em- 

 mons's Taconic System. He says, after arguing in its favor, that 

 " there may be reasons why the current literature of American 

 geology is almost silent respecting the great work of Emmons, 

 and why the Taconic is not- known among the recognized geolog- 

 ical formations." And, in view of the future triumph of the sys- 

 tem, it is added, " No amount of error, though heaped to the sky 

 and supported by the highest authority can long subsist." The 

 writer of this notice, though apparently among those aimed at in 

 these remarks, does not feel hit by them ; for he has for fifteen 

 years endeavored by hard work in the field and various published 

 papers to put the Taconic system into current geological discussion, 

 and give it its right place in the geological series ; and he has 

 still more to say on the subject from more field work. Should 

 the Taconic system, in the process, lose its identity, the time will 

 then have come for " characterizing in deserved terms the attempt 

 to bury the Taconic in the Quebec coffin ;"* and we shall hope to 

 have from Prof. N. H Winchell the obit discourse. 



Among the other contents of the Report are geological notes 

 on portions of Minnesota by Mr. Warren Upham; on the Forami- 

 nifera and other organisms of the bowlder clay, by A. Wood- 

 ward and B. W. Thomas (with a plate), and by Dr. George M. 

 Dawson ; Notes on Blue Earth County, by Prof. A. F. Bechdolt, 

 in which an interglacial peat bed is described. j. d. d. 



V. Underground Temperatures. — The Proceedings of the Royal 

 Society for Feb. 12, 1885, contain an abstract of a paper on 

 underground temperatures by Professor J. Pbestwioh. The au- 

 thor reviews the published facts, and the conditions in the several 

 cases, in order to eliminate the more doubtful ones and reach the 

 probable normal rate of decrease in temperature or thermic gra- 

 dient. The various determinations give a range in the rate from 



* In this expression, Professor Winchell alludes to the fact that Sir "William 

 Logan referred the Taconic series (after a summer's study of the region in Massa- 

 chusetts, and the determination of Vermont fossils by Mr. Billings) to the Quebec 

 Group, regarded as the middle division of the Lower Silurian. But why the work 

 of this honest and able geologist, which deserves only praise, should call out re- 

 buke from any geologist and from one who has never studied the region is to us 

 inexplicable. 



