Marcou.] 
68 
[Nov. 7, 
treal, which is the old Potsdam original area of New York extended 
into Canada. Then we have a large belt extending from Phillips- 
burgh to Pointe Levis and inclosing those two most important lo- 
calities, then the island of Orleans and the whole south shores of 
the St. Lawrence river to Cape Roziere, with the exception of a 
small band between Marsouin and Griffin. This belt is quite broad ; 
it corresponds mainly to what Logan had colored on his map of 
1864, as the Quebec group of the Lower Silurian. It is separated 
from the Cambro-Silurian by what Mr. Selwyn calls the “great St. 
Lawrence and Champlain fault,” which from the south of Quebec 
city is kept constantly under water, about the middle of the St. 
Lawrence river, and which stops in the middle of the gulf of St. 
Lawrence, south of the island of Anticosti. It is a theoretical 
and invisible fault without any facts to sustain it, and is only put 
there to explain and sustain the positions taken at different times 
by the geological survey of Canada, in regard to their ever-chang- 
ing and confused classification and nomenclature. 
In the eastern townships, the Cambrian does not contain fossils* 
Mr. Ells thinks that the slates, sandstones and conglomerates which 
compose this system are “apparently uncomformable” with the 
Cambro-Silurian above and the Pre-Cambrian rocks below. It is a 
question which demands more accurate researches before admitting 
the unconformity with either. 
On the St. Lawrence river the fossils found belong to a well char- 
acterized primordial fauna ; Mr. Selwyn is the only one who con- 
tinues to maintain that the primordial fossils of Pointe Levis, 
island of Orleans and Bic harbor, are found in boulders inclosed 
in what he calls a conglomerate limestone, contemporaneous with, 
but a little above, the Calciferous, surrounded by the celebrated 
graptolite-bearing shales, which he and Mr. Walcott regard as 
Utica-Lorraine or “ clearly the Hudson river group.” 
The truth is, that we have from Swanton and Highgate in Ver- 
mont, the belt of Georgia slates, about five or six hundred feet 
thick, containing the typical primordial fauna, Olenellus Thompsoni , 
Conoceplialites , etc., which enters into Canada east of St. Armand, 
and goes right up to St. Denis and Bic harbor. Until now that 
most important belt of Georgia slates has not received the proper 
attention to which it is entitled, in the whole province of Quebec. 
No fossils have yet been found on the line indicated, except, I think, 
but I am not sure, only at one point in Artabaska county. Near 
