BUFFALO SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCES 191 



Along an open coast exposed to the full force of the waves great 

 boulders may indeed pile up, but they will be in a very narrow strip 

 at the foot of the cliffs and will rapidly decrease in size until within 

 but a few feet from shore no large ones will be found and those which 

 do occur will be in only a thin layer wedging out seaward. More- 

 over, a boulder conglomerate formed along a seacoast would almost 

 certainly be fossiliferous, as I shall point out below. Such a con- 

 glomerate might, however, easily be piled up by the waters of the 

 swift and powerful torrents which periodically occur in desert regions. 

 In large basins of inland drainage the rivers flowing down the enclos- 

 ing mountains bring in great quantities of debris which is coarse and 

 bouldery near the mountains and finer further out. Davis records 

 that "A great part of Persia consists of large basins enclosed by moun- 

 tains and without outlet to the sea. Long waste slopes stretch for- 

 ward five or ten miles with a descent of 1000 to 2000 feet, stony near 

 the mountain flanks and gradually becoming finer textured and more 

 nearly level. The central depressions are absolute deserts of drifting 

 sands with occasional saline lakes or marshes" (87, quoted from Davis, 

 50, 588). 



(b) Faunal. Throughout the Old Red sandstone of Great Britain 

 and the continent, typical marine organisms are absent except where 

 this facies interfingers with the Devonic marine facies. The types 

 of life represented in this whole series are few and yet of exceeding 

 interest, since they are among the earliest of land forms, such as 

 scorpions, insects, freshwater Crustacea, fish and eurypterids, while 

 the flora, though much poorer than that from the Gaspe sandstone 

 of New Brunswick, yet shows the presence of ferns, coniferous trees 

 and vascular cryptogams. The Caledonian Old Red, which is largely 

 conglomeratic, has yielded comparatively few fossil remains, but in 

 the Pterygotus-or Carmylie- sandstones of Forfar, Pterygotus angli- 

 cus has been found associated with Parka decipiens and at a higher 

 horizon Cephalaspis and Pteraspis occur, and still higher the Acan- 

 thodian beds of Turin with a good fish fauna as well as Pterygotus 

 anglicus and Stylonurus ensiformis. Thus, in the Caledonian Old 

 Red, a series 12,500 feet or more in thickness, the fish and eurypterids 

 are the only abundant organisms. This single faunal fact would 

 be sufficient, even though all other types of evidence were wanting, 

 to make me say that those two groups of organisms lived in the rivers 

 (see criteria, p. 77 above). In the Orcadian the fauna is more 



