Geology and Mineralogy. 75 
fragments of his labors as State geologist, but never, until the 
a volume, in the year 1886, did the State government pub- 
lish for distribution any of the results of his survey. 
The volume will be of interest at the present day chiefly for 
purposes of compilation. The stratigraphical deductions of the 
Shumards are now known to have been erroneous, and their sec- 
tions of the Cretaceous strata of Texas, as published by Dr. 
B. F. Shumard in 1860, most assuredly place the bottom of the 
Texas strata on top, the top in the middle, and all the other 
subdivisions equally out of place. Mr. Jules Marcou,* in 1861, 
called attention to this discrepancy, and published an approxi- 
mately correct ideal section; but his then recently published 
erroneous opinion concerning the alleged Jurassic age of certain 
Texas strata prevented this criticism from carrying with it the 
weight it deserved. 
The portion of the work entitled a “Detailed Report of the 
Geology of Grayson County,” is especially misleading, for it leads 
the reader to believe that in that vicinity is to be found nearly 
every representative of the series from the Tertiary to the base 
of all the Cretaceous strata of Texas. This is not the case, how- 
ever, for the writer has examined the whole region in person, and 
found that Dr. Shumard’s Tertiary is Cretaceous, and that his — 
“ Lower Cretaceous” is really the very top of the great group of 
the period which once covered Texas west of that county, and 
which, in it, is partially covered by the southwestern prolongation 
of Hilgard’s Mississippi series. 
It is to be hoped that the State of Texas will not only publish 
all the results of the old Shumard survey that it can lay hands 
upon, but that it will some day resume the geological work which 
it once began with so much earnestness. ify My EHO OLy 
4. The Washoe Rocks, by G. F. Becxer. (Bull. California 
Acad. Sci., Nov., 1886. —The views of Mr. Becker on the Washoe 
Rocks, as published in 1883, are briefly presented in a notice of 
his paper in vol. xxvi of this Journal (p. 479). A subsequent 
detailed study of Mr. Becker’s sections of the rocks by Messrs. 
Hague and Iddings, in connection with an earlier study of the 
region by Mr. Hague, led them to different views, as stated in vol. 
xxx of this Journal (p. 388), 1886, these authors, making out that 
several of the igneous rocks, regarded by preceding authors as 
independent in age and mass, were of the same age and mass, 
although varying from scoriaceous to granitoid in | texture. To 
the latter article Mr. Becker replies in his recent paper. 
Mr. Becker states that he has new evidence of the existence, in 
the region, of diabase as a pre-Tertiary rock, and of the fact of 
two distinct out-flows of pyroxene-andesite ‘of different periods. 
On the first point he mentions that six miles from the Comstock 
lode, in a Jura-trias sediment, diabase pebbles occur which are 
lithologically like the diabase of the east wall of the lode; and 
* Proc. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist., viii, 1861. 
