418) J. D. Dana—Taconic Rocks and Stratigraphy. 
Tn view of these twenty-five years of opposition, and of present. 
indications, it is of interest to read again (if already once read) 
the pathetic remark on page 122 of the paper in the Naturalist. 
“There is a painful resemblance in many respects between the 
story of Emmons and of his opponents and that of the warfare 
waged against Sedgwick by Murchison and his allies in the fam- 
ous Cambrian and Silurian controversy, as set forth by the present 
writer in 1874 in his Chemical and Geological Essays (pp. 364, 
365):” the same volume that contains Dr. Hunt’s Association 
Addiess. 
A note to “ opponents” in this sentence states a further incident 
in the ‘ persecution” from a letter by Professor Emmons, in 
which Professor Emmons says, that “the editor of the American 
Journal of Science refused to publish my remarks upon Logan’s 
Report when he [Logan] announced his Huronian Sysivm, 
though their tenor was courteous in the extreme; I claimed that 
the Huronian was only the Taconic System.” The refusal was on 
the ground that the “remarks ” contained no facts sustaining the 
opinion, and that opinions on such a point without facts were of 
no value to the science. The Huronian region and the Taconic 
were remote from one another, aud Logan’s discoveries of fossils. 
in Canada seemed to be too decisive to be so set aside. 
But this instance of ‘‘ persecution” occurred far back in that 
rian sections. Completely inverting, as I have elsewhere shown, the order of 
succession in his Tacome system, estimated by him at 30,000 feet, he placed near 
the base of the lower division of the system, the Stockbridge or Kolian limestone, 
including the white marbles of Vermont, which by their organic remains have 
since been by Billings found to belong to the Levis formation [Quebec group]. 
The following are those on the other side. 
On the Azoic Rocks of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Report EH, of Geol. Survey 
1878, pp. 206, 207. ‘‘ We have given reasons for regarding the Lower Taconic, 
or the Primal and Auroral strata of the great Appalachian Valley as the equiva- 
lents of the similar series in southern N. Brunswick and of the Hastings series 
in Ontario with its Scolithus and Eozoon. While it has been shown, in a preced- 
ing chapter, that the Upper Taconic includes the organic remains of the Huropean 
Cambrian at least as low as the Menevian, it is by no means certain whether 
the Lower Taconic series is to be regarded as the equivalent of the still lower 
beds of the Cambrian of Great Britain and Sweden. In this uncertainty it is 
deemed well to preserve for this series the original name of Taconic.” 
“The Taconic Question.” 84 pp. 4to, published in the volumes of the Transac- 
tions of the Royal Society of Canada for 1883 and 1884. In the “conclusions ’” 
the author says (pp. 149, 150): ‘There exists in eastern North America a great 
group of stratified rocks, consisting of quartzytes, limestones, argillites and soft 
crystalline schists, which have altogether a thickness of 4000 feet or more, and 
are found resting unconformably upon various more ancient crystalline rocks 
from the Laurentian to the Montalban inclusive. This series called Transition by 
Maclure .... is the Lower Taconic of Emmons.” This series which I have pre- 
ferred to call Taconian is essentially one of Transition crystalline rocks.”—p. 151, 
“The Taconian, as I have suggested. may constitute a link between the older 
EKozoie groups and those of Paleozoic time.”—p. 151, ‘‘the Upper Taconic group, 
the First Graywacke of Eaton, the Potsdam and Quebec groups of Logan (which 
include a large part of what was described by Mather and by Logan as Hudson 
River group) we have seen to be the Appalachian representative of the Cambrian 
group.” 
If any one doubts whether the author of the preceding extracts and of the arti- 
cle in the Naturalist is one and the same person he must investigate for himself. 
