76 The American Geologisf. February, i»9» 
system, exhibiting fuUy as great metamorphism through the 
Peninsula, San Bernadino, and Sierra Madre ranges, Vjut from 
the termination of the San Emedio range northwest through the 
coast region until Trinit}' county is reached a much less degree 
of metamorphism. In the coast region the sedimentary rocks are 
not crystalline save in the vicinity of the granite, which except 
in the main portion of the Santa Lucia. San Jose, and GaviJan 
ranges is not found in very large outcrops. This granite seems 
to have been squeezed up along axes of greatest disturbance and 
not to have exercised a pronounced regional metamorphism. 
Although the sea had free access through eastern Santa Bar- 
bara county to the San Joaquin valley during Tertiary times, there 
is evidently no structural break, simply a depression. In this 
depression are thick beds of sands and clays, hiding the north- 
west prolongation of the San Emedio range. After passing over 
the space now occupied 1)}' a line of Tertiar}' hills, there appears 
another granite ridge, the San Jose mountains. Northward there 
are other outcrops slightly projecting above the almost universal 
Tertiary, until the high and rugged Santa Lucia range is reached. 
The other prominent crj'stalline axis in the Coast range north of 
Ventura county is the Gavilan. Dr. Becker, one of the strongest 
supporters of the theory that the metamorphic rocks of the Coast 
ranges are Cretaceous, has admitted that if there are any forma- 
tions older than the Cretaceous in the Coast ranges, they are the 
limestone and gneissoid rocks of the Gavilan range.* It is the 
southern continuation of the granitoid rocks of this range by 
which the characteristic metamorphic series has been intruded. 
What can be admitted of the Gavilan range must also be true of 
similar rocks in the Santa Lucia. 
As far as I can learn but two specimens of fossils have been found 
in the metamorphic rocks of the central Coast ranges. One was an 
Inoceramus, presented to the old state survey by major Elliot who 
found it on Alcatraz island, San Francisco ba}'. Prof. Whitney 
says: "But so crushed and broken are the strata thus revealed to 
view and so few and indistinct the fossils which they contain, that 
it was a long time before their real age could be clearly made out, 
and it was not until after we had decided on stratigraphical and 
lithological grounds that the so called -San Francisco sandstone' 
must be of Cretaceous age that the timely discovery of a single 
*Geol. of the Quicksilver Deposits, p. 128 and 181. 
