114 The Taconic Question Restated. 4 [Feb. 
took on a comical aspect. On each side rose a swelling as if 
she had the mumps. With a hand-lens I found that these were 
blisters, white vesicles, and so buoyant as to annoy her by pro- 
ducing eccentric movements. I contrived to pierce them with a 
needle, and so to let out the confined gas. This gave immediate 
relief. But they came again, and by and by my surgery did not 
avail. They increased, and the buoyancy would raise it to the 
surface, and the little sufferer despite all help would float. And 
- so it was on the last day of February at an early hour I found 
poor Hippie afloat on her beam ends and dead. I had her alive 
just four months, and the above is but a tithe of what might be 
told of her pretty ways. 
THE TACONIC QUESTION RESTATED. 
BY T. STERRY HUNT. 
§ 1. So much obscurity and misconception still exist in the 
minds of most geologists regarding what have been called the Ta- 
conic rocks, that it seems desirable to set forth clearly, and more 
concisely than has yet been done, the principal facts in the history 
of the two wholly distinct and very unlike groups of strata which 
- have hitherto been included under this title, and which occupy 
very important places in American stratigraphy as well as in 
economic mineralogy. For a clear understanding of these strata, 
which, as originally described, lie between the crystalline schists. 
of western New England and the continuous area of rocks be- 
longing to the Ordovician (Chazy-Loraine) period, found along 
the Hudson and Champlain valleys, we must go back to the 
writings of Amos Eaton, in which we find, as early as 1832,a 
concise but complete exposition of the great stratigraphical prob- 
lems presented by the region in question. The gneisses, with 
hornblendic and micaceous schists, of the Atlantic belt were then 
by Eaton as the slaty or argillaceous member, consti- 
tuting the lowest division, of his triple series of Primitive rocks; 
r a ad were decbered by him to be there followed by the second or 
cious, and the third or calcareous member of the same series. 
ies DOS Granular. Quartz-rock and the Granular Lime- 
