38 THE PHYSICAL FEATURES OF CECIL COUNTY 



Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean which would agree with later 

 strata of Europe. 



John Finch's suggestions seemed to have had a stimulating effect 

 on American geologists, for a number of papers followed in rapid 

 succession in which the attempt was repeatedly made to divide the 

 Alluvium into its natural formations and to correlate them with 

 established horizons in Europe. These early investigators, although 

 keen men in certain instances, did not, however, have the necessary 

 training to cope successfully with the problems which they sought to 

 solve. None of them seemed to have realized the peculiar difficulties 

 of Coastal Plain stratigraphy. All of them did their work rapidly 

 and unsystematically, and most of them reached their conclusions 

 prematurely. Seldom was a paper accompanied by a geological map, 

 few localities were given and descriptions were usually ambiguous 

 and unsatisfactory. The result was that the formations described 

 by one investigator were almost sure to be included in those described 

 by another, and out of the endless confusion which arose from this 

 sort of work, little of value has survived. It was not until geologists 

 in connection with the Johns Hopkins University, the United States 

 and Maryland Geological Surveys, made a systematic study of Cecil 

 county and the adjacent region that a subdivision and a natural classi- 

 fication was finally worked out. 



In 1825, Van Rensselaer carried Finch's views still further and 

 declared that the deposits of the Atlantic Coast from Martha's Vine- 

 yard southward and included between the Alleghany Mountains and 

 the ocean were Tertiary. He divided this Tertiary into Plastic clay, 

 London clay and Upper Marine. A little later, Morton accepted 

 Van Rensselaer's correlation of the great deposits bearing fossil shells 

 in Maryland with the Upper Marine of Europe, but appears to have 

 expanded its limits somewhat; he also described fossil shells which 

 were secured from the beds which we now know belong to the Upper 

 Cretaceous. A little later, Vanuxem. and Morton divided the Coastal 

 Plain deposits into Secondary and Tertiary and ancient and modern 

 Alluvial. They defined also the boundaries of each. Two years 

 later, in 1830, Morton correlated the Ferruginous sand formation in 



