1887] The Taconic Question Restated. 319 
ites of Ontario. There also the limestones have yielded the re- 
mains of an organism, referred by Dawson to Zozoon canadense, 
filled not with a mineral silicate, as in the Laurentian serpentinic 
limestones, but with an earthy carbonaceous matter. To these 
should be added the occurrence of the remains of Lingula, found 
by Prime in the Taconian limestones of Pennsylvania, and of the 
remains of a keratose sponge in the argillite of this series, found 
by the writer in 1883 near Thomson, Minnesota. All of these 
facts (except the last) were insisted upon by the writer in 1876, 
.and again in 1880, when in discussing the question whether 
the Taconian series is to be referred to eozoic or to palzozoic 
time, it was said that while to draw the line between them will be 
as difficult as to define that between paleozoic and mesozoic, or 
between mesozoic and cenozoic, “we may hope to find in the 
Taconic series a fauna which will help to fill the wide interval 
. which now divides that of the eozoic rocks from the Cambrian ;” 
adding that “we should seek in the study of stratigraphical geol- 
ogy not the breaks dividing groups from each other so much as 
the beds of passage which serve to unite all these ponp in one 
great system.” 
38. We have thus endeavored in the preceding pages to re- 
state briefly the Taconic Question in some of its more important 
aspects. Further details, and the references to original sources, 
will be found in our recently published volume entitled ‘ Mineral 
Physiology and Physiography,” pp. 517-686. Therein appear the 
papers, published under the title of “ The Taconic Question in 
Geology,” in volumes i. and ii. of the “ Transactions of the Royal 
Society of Canada in 1883 and 1884,” in part rewritten and con- 
siderably augmented. In that volume will be found, on page 520, 
a tabular view (also published in the “ Report on the Progress of 
Geology by the Smithsonian Institution for 1883”), wherein the 
stratigraphical sequence of the rocks of North America, in- 
cluding the Taconian series, and its relations alike to the older 
e i$ 
crystalline rocks below and to the First and Second Graywackes 
above, is shown to have been correctly indicated as early as 1832 
by Amos Eaton, the preceptor of Ebenezer Emmons. Had the 
teachings of that great master in American geology been gener- 
ally followed, it is not too much to say that a half-century of 
confusion, TERE EE and controversy would have been 
_avoided. It is the great merit of Emmons that he sought, 
