342 The American Geologist. June, 1891 
common, and occasionally some are found of purest crystal- 
line quartz. The gravel also contains fragments of silcified 
wood and of petrified mammalian bones. Occasionally round 
masses of clay are met with. Near the cit} T of McPher- 
son, where extensive excavations have been made in the sand, a 
number of angular boulders of Cretaceous claj T have been laid 
bare, some of which are over eight feet in the direction of their 
longest diameter. These boulders must have been transported a 
considerable distance, for no similar rocks are known to occur un- 
disturbed within a distance of thirty miles. At the same place 
just above the sand and gravel in a somewhat soil-like stratum 
there was exposed in the bank, a few feet apart and extending for 
a distance of at least two rods, two la} T ers of rounded boulders of 
a pure white calcareous substance and having a diameter of from 
three to eighteen inches. They were crowded together and their 
position was such as to suggest that thej- were left in their present 
position by stranded ice. This suggestion is supported by the 
circumstance that the locality is towards the rim of the trough. 
As far as the writer has been able to find out, the material of 
these boulders is unlike any rock found in the state. It consists 
of an aggregate of crystals of carbonate of lime ( arragonite ? ) 
with an average length of .0001 mm. Mr. Geo. P. Men-ill, who 
has examined it, sa}-s he has seen similar material from the 
Cretaceous of the south. That these boulders have been trans- 
ported by floating ice does not admit of a doubt, and a southern 
or south-eastern extension of the water in which the ice floated, 
would not seem improbable. A large chert-pebble from the 
gravel was found by Mr. E. 0. Ulrich to contain several br} T ozoans 
from the the Sub-carboniferous.* From the gravel and sand have 
been taken the following fossils, identified by professors E. D. 
Cope and R. Ellsworth Call (Nos. 1 and 2 are from the bottom of 
the gravel, the others from near the top of the sand ): 
1) Megalonyx, sp.f 2) Equus major De Kay. 
*Professor J. W. Spencer thinks central Missouri affords evidence of 
a northern (north-western '?) extension of the waters in which some of 
a subaqueous drift described by him was deposited. See "Sand-boul- 
ders in the drift, etc.," by J. W. Spencer, Am. Nat., October, 1887. p. 
921. The bryozoans in the pebble examined by Mr. Ulrich were Fenes- 
tella aperta Hall. F. compressa Ulrich, and Polypora maccoyana Ulrich, 
the two last ones belonging to the Keokuk group. 
+Thc fossil is a skull, which quite closely resembles Megalonyx jeffer- 
soni Harlan, but differs from this in some important respects. At an 
early date it will be described by Dr. J. Lindahl as Megalonyx leidyi in 
