NATURAL SCIENCES OE PHILADELPHIA. 
91 
The importance of the discovery of these rocks in Kansas cannot fail to im- 
press our geologists, as the existence of any Permian in this country has been 
long and strenuously denied by nearly all the American geologists. Mr. Lea 
believed he was the first to suggest that the Red Saiidstone of Connecticut, New 
Jersey, Pennsylvania, &c., bearing foot marks and other impressions of animal 
and vegetable life, were of Permian origin and older than the Lias,* but not 
older than the " New Red Sandstone "f of Europe, as supposed by Elie de Beau- 
mont and Dr. Jackson ; and in the memoir which Mr. Lea then read before 
this Academy, describing the Ciepsi/saurus Pennsi/lvaniciis, of Upi:)er Milford, 
Pennsylvania, he stated, in regard to the formation in which these bones were 
imbedded, that he was ' ' inclined to place it among the superior strata of the 
Permian system. "J In 1834 Mr. R. C. Taylor considered the coal of the Lignites 
of Fredericksburg, Virginia to be "coeval with the Oolites." 
In 1836 Prof. H. D. Rogers stated that those red sandstones which he charac- 
terized as Middle Secondary Strata, " implied a date somewhere intermediate 
between that of the coal and that of the green sand ;"§ and afterwards with 
his brother, Prof. W. B. Rogers and Sir Charles Lyell, || he considered that part 
of this system which containes the coal near Richmond, Virginia, was " closely 
related to the earliest deposits of the Oolite formation of Great Britain ;" and 
he was disposed to add the whole of the red strata of his Middle Secondary Red 
Sandstone to these, and " assign them a position at or near the base of the great 
Jurassic system.""^ In 1839, Mr. Gesner in his Oeological Survey of the 
Province of New Brunswick, assigned the variegated Red Sandstone Rock of 
Saint Andrews, at the mouth of the St. Croix river, to the ' ' Bunter Sand- 
stone," the lowest member of the Triassic.** 
The late Mr. Redfield long since regarded the fossil fishes found in the Con- 
necticut sandstone as Triassic ; and a few years since he stated at the meeting 
of the American Association at Cincinnati, that this formation was character- 
ized by a flora and fauna as recent as the Trias. In this, Prof. Agassiz difi'ered 
from him, as he placed this formation at the base of the Liassic series. 
In a note, to a memoir on BatJo/gnatus borealis by Dr. Leidy,f f Mr. Dawson in 
reference to the older rocks of Prince Edward Island, says, " these beds may 
either belong to the top of the carboniferous system, or to an overlying deposit 
of the Permian or Triassic age, and in either case the red sandstones which 
conformably overlie them will be equivalent to the New Red of Western Nova 
Scotia and Connecticut, and probably Triassic or Permian." These views 
tend to confirm Mr. Lea's, published several years before ; and, subsequently 
Prof. Emmons, who thought in 1853, that the red sandstones of North Caro- 
lina belonged to the Trias, changed his views in 1856, and while confirming 
Mr. Lea's as regarded the existence of the Permian, divided the well marked 
beds of Deep River, in North Carolina§§ into Permian and Trias, with their inferior 
divisions stating their equivalency to the European systems, and he considers 
the Chatham series of North Carolina, the Newark series of New Jersey? and the 
Greenfield series of Connecticut Valley, to represent one epoch belonging to the 
Permian. The Gwynedd series and that of Phoenixville, being evidently of the 
same horizon with the above mentioned. Prof. Emmons agrees with Mr. Lea, 
in referring these rocks to the Permian epoch, identified as they are in North 
*Mr. Dawson, in Journ. Geological Soc, 1847, stated that the Red Sandstone of Prince 
Edward Island and Connecticut may be the same, and may be regarded as a post car- 
boniferous deposit of uncertain age. 
t Journ. Acad. Nat. Sci., May 11th, 1852, vol. 2, new series, p. 185. 
I ^ Journ. Acad. Nat. Sci., vol 2, new series, p. 195. 
I § Geology of New Jersey, p. 116. 
|j Journal Geological Society, 1847. 
^Johnston's Physical Alias, p. 32. 
**Page 15. 
"J ttJournal Acad, N. S, vol. 2, new series, page 330, 1854. 
It Geological Report on North Carolina, p. 272. 
See his excellent and thorough Reports of 1856, 1857. 
1858.] 
