BUFFALO SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCES 1 59 



slight positive one, with the consequent killing off of the fish, a 

 bone-bed would be formed and in a given section would be found 

 overlying a Lingula bed, as does the Temeside Bone-Bed (F d). Were 

 the sea to retreat again, more Lingulae would be left stranded, while 

 fluviatile organisms that were light enough might be floated out 

 across the flood-plains of the rivers. These flood plains had but just 

 been retrieved from the sea and would have been so slightly raised 

 above sea level that only lighter organic remains such as the Lingulae 

 were washed over it, thus fluviatile remains of small specific gravity 

 would be carried out across the flood-plain there to come to rest with 

 the Lingulae, and in this way the olive shales with eurypterid frag- 

 ments and Lingula cornea would be easily explained. The impos- 

 sibility of considering either fish or eurypterids as washed in from 

 the sea is indicated by the absence of these forms in the open marine 

 waters to the south. While I have made no attempt to prove the 

 fluviatile habitat of the fishes, yet the bone-beds seem capable of ex- 

 planation on no other hypothesis. Sometimes the beds are only \ 

 inch thick, containing no complete remains but only a great mass 

 of broken bones, spines, and scales. Such an accumulation could be 

 formed only of transported material, the fish skeletons having been 

 entirely scattered. If a bone-bed were accounted for as due to the 

 sudden destruction of fishes in the sea by a current of colder or more 

 saline water, by an earthquake or some other catastrophic calamity, 

 then the fish would die in great numbers, but their remains would be 

 buried in situ. An illustration of this is found in the case of the 

 tile fish off the New England coast, where, in 1882, according to es- 

 timates, over one billion fish were destroyed, and the ocean floor was 

 covered in this region to a depth of 6 feet with the bodies of the dead 

 tile fish (Grabau, 87, 195). Entire skeletons would be preserved in 

 the rapid burial, and other marine organisms which suffered the same 

 fate as the fish would also be entombed, so that the resulting deposit 

 would in no way resemble the bone-beds, which are made up of 

 fragments, usually so broken that identification cannot be made, 

 while marine shells are only rarely found. 



The Ludlow and Lanaekian of Lanarkshire. The inliers of 

 Siluric rocks are larger in Lanarkshire than in the Pentland Hills, and 

 the succession is shown more completely, for in Lanarkshire the 

 structure is anticlinal, while in the Pentland Hills the beds have 

 been repeatedly faulted and stand nearly vertical, making it impos- 

 sible to trace an outcrop except along the strike. About 5500 feet 



