220 Scientific Intelligence. 



of the city of St. John, New Brunswick, and chiefly in the suburb 

 of Lancaster, occur tilted and metamorphosed sandstones with 

 thin dark shale partings. These beds in 1861 attracted the 

 attention of G. F. Matthew and C. F. Hartt, who collected fossil 

 plants from them, and they have been known ever since as the 

 " Fern Ledges " of the Little River group. Matthew and Hartt 

 held the age of this flora to be Devonian, and sent their material 

 to Sir William Dawson at the time he. was studying the Perry, 

 Gaspe, and New York plants, which are undoubtedly Devonian. 

 He put all the collections together and described them as of a 

 single period, the Devonian. Thus arose great confusion, and 

 even though many paleontologists in the past fifteen years have 

 pointed out that these "Fern Ledges" are of Pennsylvanian 

 time, there is still one who holds that they are of the Silurian. 

 The first to dissent from Dawson's age determination was the able 

 German paleontologist, Geinitz, who held in 1866 that the asso- 

 ciated insects, described by Scudder as of Devonian time, did not 

 belong to this period, but rather to the Coal Measures. This view 

 has since been backed up by Kidston, David White, Ami, Zeiller, 

 Handlirsch, Jongmans, and now decidedly by Doctor Stopes. 



The author of the contribution under discussion has done her 

 work with the greatest care, having made collections at St. John, 

 under the guidance of Doctor Matthew, and then studied the 

 original material described by Dawson, Hartt, and Matthew. 

 Finally, all the good material was taken to the British Museum, 

 where it could be compared with large and authentic collections, 

 and where a complete library was accessible. Not only this, but 

 Doctor Stopes called to her assistance all paleobotanists who 

 could help in the work, so that the available specimens might be 

 accurately identified. 



The flora of the "Fern Ledges" had risen to eighty described 

 species, but of these Doctor Stopes finds " only about forty that 

 are of value and that are determined on a sufficiently sound basis 

 to make them of any real use in the comparison of this flora with 

 others." The final list is reduced to twenty-nine " good species," 

 and twelve others that have " some stratigraphic significance." 



The plants of the Little River group constitute " a single flora, 

 in the sense that they represent a period of time no longer than a 

 single main division of the Carboniferous." White regarded the 

 flora as of Upper Pottsville time, and Kidston referred it to the 

 European Lower Coal Measures. The present author, however, 

 concludes that "the 'Fern Ledges' represent plant debris from 

 differing ecological situations which were all growing in that 

 period of time in the Coal Measures which is best known as the 

 Westphalian, and that probably it corresponds in point of time 

 most nearly to the lowest zone of the middle Westphalian." 



The Little River flora is not the usual swamp flora of the Penn- 

 sylvanian, but is " the remains of the inland flora of the period, 

 and one which had travelled down stream as debris for some dis- 

 tance before being entombed." This is especially well seen in 



