Charles Schuchert — Historical Geology, 1818-1918. 59 



of the igneous rocks and writes of the Wernerian system 

 as "fast going out of fashion " (5, 197, 1822), while 

 Hitchcock said about the same thing in 1825 (9, 146). 



The Work of Eaton. — Amos Eaton, after traveling 

 10,000 miles and completing his Erie Canal Report in 

 1824, "reviewed the whole line several times, " and pub- 

 lished in 1828 in the Journal (14, 145) a paper on Geolog- 

 ical Nomenclature, Classes of Rocks, etc. The broader 

 classification is the Wernerian one of Primitive, Transi- 

 tion, and Secondary classes. Under the first two he has 

 fossiliferous early Paleozoic formations, but does not 

 know it, because he pays no attention anywhere to the 

 detail of the entombed fossils, and all of his Secondary 

 is what we now call Paleozoic. The correlations of the 

 latter are faulty throughout. 



Then came his paper of 1830, Geological Prodromus 

 (17, 63), in which he says: "I intend to demonstrate 

 . . . that all geological strata are arranged in five analo- 

 gous series ; and that each series consists of three forma- 

 tions; viz., the Carboniferous [meaning mud-stones], 

 Quartzose, and Calcareous." We seem to see here 

 expressed for the first time the idea of "cycles of sedi- 

 mentation, " but Eaton does not emphasize this idea, and 

 the localities given for each "formation" of "analogous 

 series ' ' demonstrate beyond a doubt that he did not have 

 a sedimentary sequence. The whole is simply a jumble 

 of unrelated formations that happen to agree more or 

 less in their physical characters. 



"I intend to demonstrate," he says further, "that 

 the detritus of New Jersey, embracing the marie, which 

 contains those remarkable fossil relics, is antediluvial, or 

 the genuine Tertiary formation." This correlation had 

 been clearly shown by Finch in 1824 (7, 31) and yet both 

 are in error in that they do not distinguish the included 

 Cretaceous marls and greensands as something apart 

 from the Tertiary. 



One gets impatient with the later writings of Eaton, 

 because he does not become liberalized with the progres- 

 sive ideas in stratigraphic geology developing first in 

 Europe and then in America, especially among the geolo- 

 gists of Philadelphia. Therefore it is not profitable to 

 follow his work further. 



Early American Text-boohs of Geology. — The first 

 American text-book of geology bears the date of Boston 



