Marcou.] 
364 
[Nov. 6, 
there ; and I have only to sustain me, my love of geology and my 
consciousness of doing work, which nobody else was willing to un- 
dertake. 
Happily in geology a Director of a geological survey backed by 
large appropriations, and a staff of fifty assistants or colleagues, 
cannot make erroneous observations and have “his individual opin- 
ion’’ accepted as correct for any length of time ; and whatever Mr. 
Selwyn may think of my researches about the city of Quebec, I 
have full confidence in the long run in the value of my observations 
made in conformity with all the principles of practical stratigraphy 
and in accord with lithology as well as palaeontology. For we are 
now already very far from my starting point of 1849, when I first 
made a hasty survey of the vicinity of Quebec, in company with 
my friend Francois Xavier Garneau, the historian of Canada. The 
“thick development of slates” of Quebec, Pointe Levis and La 
Chaudiere cannot now be referred to the Hudson river group, the 
Oneida and Medina formation, and the primordial fauna of Pointe 
Levis cannot be transferred above the second fauna. Mr. Selwyn 
is making the last effort to save what he can of that singularly in- 
correct classification used by the Geological Survey of Canada, 
and his remarks on my last paper “certainly afford no assistance 
in elucidating the geological structure of such a complicated region 
as we have to deal with in the Province of Quebec” (op. cit., p. 
218). All his efforts cannot suppress my five papers 1 on the geol- 
ogy of the area of Quebec, my tables of the “stratigraphy of the 
Province of Quebec,” published in the Proc. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist, 
vol. xxiv, p. 79, or my paper “Canadian geological classification 
for the Province of Quebec.” These, as well as my “Abstract 
Section of the vicinity of Pointe Levis, Chaudiere falls and Quebec” 
of 1862, can stand the wear and tear of time, for they are consti- 
tuted on a “basis of fact ” in the field of the vicinity of the city of 
Quebec. 
1 On the primordial fauna and the Taconic system, by Joachim Barrande, with addi* 
tional notes by Jules Marcou. Boston, I860. 
The Taconic and Lower Silurian rocks of Vermont and Canada. Boston. 1861. 
Letter to M. Joachim Barrande, on the Taconic rocks of Vermont and Canada. Cam- 
bridge, 1862. 
Notice sur les gisements des lentilles trilob itif feres taconiques de la Pointe Levis au 
Canada. Paris, 1864. 
Canadian Classification for the Province of Quebec. Salem, 1889. 
