1887] The Taconic Question Restated. 249 
the horizon of the Upper Taconic or Taconic slate group—the 
Transition or First Graywacke of Eaton—to be, as taught by 
Emmons in 1842, the lower part of the Silurian system, as he un- 
derstood it, and as he later declared it to be, the Primordial zone 
or Primordial Silurian of Barrande. If, then, we except small’ 
areas of true Silurian (Lower Helderberg) and possibly Devonian 
Strata, as at Becraft's Mountain, near Hudson, New York, and, 
according to James Hall (as cited by Edward Hitchcock), in 
Vermont, it will be seen that the great belt of Graywacke, stretch- 
ing from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson River in Dutchess 
County, is of Cambrian age, with overlying and included patches 
of Ordovician (Chazy-Loraine) and a few small areas of Silurian. 
It may here be added that the evident ignorance of these his- 
torical facts which is apparent therein, is the only excuse which 
-can be pleaded for the misstatements which have of late years 
been repeatedly put forward with regard to this important problem 
in American geology. 
§ 28. Marcou, who had already, in 1880, insisted thereon, de- 
clares in 1885, the “time has now come to make clear the prior 
right and the real advantage to be found in the use of the term 
* Taconic System,’ instead of the so generally employed ex- 
pressions ‘Cambrian’ and ‘Silurian,’ to designate the strata enclos- 
ing the Primordial fauna.* In answer to this proposition, it is to 
be said that the names of Silurian and Cambrian were proposed for 
the great Transition or Graywacke series of Wales by Murchison 
and Sedgwick in 1835 and 1836. We need not here repeat the 
long history which I have elsewhere told,? of the means by which 
it was sought by Murchison to include in his Silurian the greater 
part of the Cambrian of Sedgwick, a task in which he was seconded 
by Barrande, who called the horizon of the lowest Cambrian fauna 
—his Primordial zone—Primordial Silurian. 
In the great work of the New York geological survey, be- 
gun in 1837 and summed up in the final reports of 1842 and 
1843, a succession was independently wrought out for the Ameri- 
can palzozoic basin, in which were named the “New York ` 
System” and the “ Taconic System.” As regards the probable 
parallelism of these with the previously-named Cambrian an 
t The Taconic System, Proc. American Academy of Sciences, pit xii, 
* Hunt, History of Cambrian and Silurian, Chemical and Geologi Si heen pP- 
349-425. 
