118 Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 
benches and terraces, extend from the water to elevations of seven or 
eight hundred feet. Somewhat similar sands and gravels are thinly — 
spread over many parts of the great prairie plateau, which stretches 
eastward from the base of the mountains. <A section of these, about 
thirty feet thick, consisting of brown sand, and reddish rusty-looking 
gravel in thin bands, is seen capping the steep hill of horizontal Cre- | 
taceous shales and sandstones, which rises to an elevation of 550 feet 
above the river, immediately in rear of the Hudson bay post at Dun- 
vegan. In these high gravels the pebbles are small and pretty uniform 
in size, in which respect they seem to differ from those of the lower 
benches, which are much coarser; the small and large pebbles being 
irregularly distributed through them. These upper gravels can not well 
be distinguished from those which, near Quesnel, occupy a position 
immediately beneath the basaltic lava flows, and perhaps they belong 
to the same epoch. : 
George M. Dawson said that along the foot of the bank of the Fraser 
river, in front of the town of Quesnel, a considerable thickness of the 
hignite-bearing formation is shown. ‘The lowest seen is situated about 
a mile above the confluence of the Quesnel with the Fraser river, and 
consists of impure lignites and clays, with layers of soft sandstone and 
ironstone concretions. These are followed in ascending order by clays 
and arenaceous clays of pale-grayish, greenish and yellowish tints, 
with a general southward or southwestward dip at low angles. These 
fill the trough of a shallow synclinal over which the town of Quesnel 
stands. On the south bank of the Quesnel river, the impure lignites 
and associated beds rise again to the surface, and in some sections of 
15 or 20 feet, the lignite may constitute 1-6th of the whole. It is not, 
however, in well-defined beds, but interstratified throughout with clays 
and appears to have been deposited in the form of drift-wood by some- 
what rapidly flowing water, and is not so pure as to be of any economic 
importance. Small spots and drops of amber are abundant in some 
layers. Half a mile below the mouth of the Quesnel river, on the east 
bank of the Fraser, a cliff exposes about 100 feet in thickness of this 
lignitiferous group. The plants, from the Quesnel beds, and also from 
the lignitiferous beds on the Blackwater, are to a great extent identical 
with those described by Prof. Heer from the ‘“ Miocene” of Alaska, 
though the age of these beds may be and probably is older than the 
Miocene. 
The basaltic series, consisting of several or many horizontal or over- 
lapping flows, with the exception of those areas of older rocks protru- 
