136 Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 
this for the same climate except so far as the proportion of the land 
and water surface may have acted to change it. It, too, is highly fos- 
siliferous in some of its exposures, and the shells, generally, belong to 
living genera and many of the species still survive in the waters bor- 
dering the adjacent coast. | 
The marine Pliocene strata are found in Maryland, superimposed 
upon the Miocene, and in South Carolina upon the Eocene, and, gener- 
ally, forming a narrow border at the east of these outcrops on the At- 
lantic coast and a wider border on the south adjoining the Gulf coast. 
Fossil shells of species now living on the adjacent coast abound inter- 
mingled with those which have become extinct. Thenumber of living 
species indicates, so far as one may be capable of judging, identically 
the same climate on the eastern coast of the United States that now pre- 
vails, substantially the same may be said of the Pliocene of the Pacific 
coast, and especially of the California strata of this age and the living 
and extinct species. Indeed, there is no palzeontological evidence that 
the Pliocene climate was different from the present, on this continent, 
nor could we reasonably suppose it to have been different, because the 
outlines of the continent were nearly the same as they are now. 
The Pliocene so graduates into the Post-pliocene at many places that 
the separation of the two is very difficult, and in others it is wholly 
impracticable, and, in such cases, an arbitrary approximating line for 
separation is assumed. 
The marine Post-pliocene of the eastern coast, south of the State of 
New York, and bordering the Atlantic and the Gulf, and also on the 
Pacific coast, is usually found conformable with the Pliocene below, 
and always graduating into the present or modern times without a 
break stratigraphically or paleontologically. In South Carolina it 
forms a belt along the coast 8 or 9 miles wide, and the fossils nearly 
all belong to living species now inhabiting the coast. There are, in 
layers of blue mud, and also in the sands which succeed them of this 
age, the bones of horses, hogs, dogs, rabbits, beavers, tapirs, and other 
mammals that flourished, as far as we can judge, throughout the 
period. Here rests the evidence that the climate of South Carolina, 
during the Post-pliocene, was substantially the same that it is at 
present, and it seems to be conclusive, in the absence of any geologi- 
cal evidence to the contrary. The stratigraphical indications of the 
Post-pliocene of Texas and California, and the paleontological evi- 
dences, without a single exception, are that there has been no change 
in the climate of these States since the Pliocene age. That man was 
