Marcou.] 
82 
[Nov. 7, 
however, made an absurd mistake in coloring all the region north 
of the Laurentine Mountains (Arctic circle) as Cambrian! while 
every one knows it is Upper Silurian.” 
As Dr. Emmons expresses it in one of his letters to me : “placed 
as he was, lie (Billings) must have run great risks in the course he 
took” (The Taconic system and its position in stratigraphic geology 
by Jules Marcou, Proceed. Amer. Acad., Vol. xn, p. 189, Cam- 
bridge, 1885). However near the end of his life Billings published 
in 1872, two papers entitled : “On the Taconic controversy” (‘The 
Canadian Naturalist and Geologist,’ April and July), in which al- 
though he diSculpates and excuses as much as he could, the errors 
committed by Logan, lie stated fairly and in undoubted terms his 
opinion on the Taconic system and Dr. Emmons’ discoveries. 
The result of the rejection of Emmons and Marcou’s classifica- 
tion and nomenclature for the eastern part of the province of Que- 
bec is an accumulation of errors without a precedent in historical 
geology. Confusion in stratigraphy, confusion in palaeontology, 
confusion in lithology, confusion in dynamic geology, confusion in 
geological maps and confusion in their explanations, confusion in 
classification, confusion in nomenclature ; confusion everywhere. 
Some groups of strata have travelled all over the different steps 
of the stratigraphical palaeozoic scale ; others have received dupli- 
cate, triplicate and even quadruplicate names. Faults have been 
created without being able to show a single locality, where they 
can be seen as incontestably existing ; changing their places at 
will, in order to explain changes in the classification ; and finally 
in despair putting them under water, as a last resource to stop crit- 
icism and demand of proofs. 
It will take years of hard and minute work to extricate the 
geological survey of Canada from its endless errors, and to put in 
their right places strata, fossils, faults, folds, anticlinal, synclinal, 
etc. 
As this may be my last contribution to the Taconic controversy, 
Ibeg permission to thank the Boston Society of Natural History, for 
having allowed me to defend the most important discovery ever made 
in geology by a son of Massachusetts, Dr. Ebenezer Emmons. This 
discovery was made on Massachusetts soil, around Williamstown 
and Williams College in the Taconic range of mountains. It was 
in the hall of this Society, that I read the letters of Barrande ad- 
dressed to me in 1860 ; and it was there that those discussions and 
