Raymond — Succession of Faunas at Levis, P. Q. 523 



Art. XLVIL — The Succession of Faunas at Levis, P. Q. y* 

 by Percy E. Raymond. 



In spite of the fact that Point Levis, on the south side of 

 the St. Lawrence River, opposite Quebec, is the typical locality 

 for the cosmopolitan and widely known early Ordovician grap- 

 tolites, the distribution of the species and the succession of 

 faunas at that locality have remained entirely unknown. The 

 description of the graptolites collected by James Richardson in 

 1854 and the two following years was intrusted by Sir William 

 Logan to James Hall, and Hall described the species, first 

 without figures, in the Report of Progress of the Geological 

 Survey of Canada for 1857 (1858), and later with very full and 

 beautiful illustrations in a Decade of the same Survey in 1865. 

 Many of the species there described have since been found to 

 have a world-wide distribution, and thanks to the labors of dis- 

 tinguished British and Scandinavian paleontologists, very 

 orderly successions of graptolite faunas have been worked out 

 for Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Australia. 



After Hall's description of the fauna from Levis, almost 

 nothing was done with American early Ordovician (Canadian) 

 graptolites until 1902, when Ruedemann worked out the succes- 

 sion of faunas in the " Graptolite facies of the Beekmantown 

 formation in Rensselaer County, K. Y.,"f and showed that the 

 general succession of faunules in that section was in substantial 

 agreement with the successions which had been worked out in 

 other countries. 



At Levis itself something has been done between 1854 and 

 the present, but almost nothing which has added to our knowl- 

 edge of the locality. The original collections were apparently 

 gathered from a number of localities at Levis, and all put 

 together under one label. Nicholson visited Levis in 1872 and 

 described some new species from the locality the next year, but 

 as may be seen from his list,;}; he likewise mixed his collections. 

 Gurley does not seem to have visited the locality, but on the 

 basis of collections makes two zones, the main zone in black 

 shale with Clonograjjtus flexilis, and a second higher zone 

 with Diplograpsidse. He had no way of determining the rela- 

 tions of these zones, but the event has shown that he was 

 correct in making a separation and assigning his " hard, ring- 

 ing shales " to a higher horizon than the " soft black shale."§ 



At various times from 1854 to 1888 the officers of the 



Geological Survey of Canada have collected at Levis, but they 



were especially active in 1887 and 1888, when a number of 



* Published by permission of the Director of the Geological Survey of 



fBull". 52. N. Y. State Museum, p. 546, 1902. 

 {Amn. Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 4, vol. xi, p. 134, 1873. 

 § Jour. Geology, vol. iv, p. 302, 1896. 



Am. Jour. Sct. — Fourth Series, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 228. — December, 1914. 

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