Editotial Comment. 191 
series is to be correlated with the Fort Pierre and Fox Hills 
or Montana formation of the western United States. Paleo- 
botanically the Atane series is so closely related to the Vine- 
yard series of Marthas Vineyard, the Amboy clays of the 
Raritan region of New Jersey, or the uppermost Potomac of 
Alabama as to furnish strong reason for the belief that the 
middle of Heer's groups is the Greenland contemporary of 
the Amboy clays. The Patoot series, which appears litho- 
logically and stratigraphically to be inseparable from the 
Atane series, contains at the same time many plants common 
in the upper part of the Amboy clays, with others allied more 
closely to the higher Cretaceous floras, such as that of the 
Laramie. The Patoot series may perhaps be safely inter- 
preted as constituting a paleontological as well as sedimentary 
transition from the Atane series to the Tertiary. The thick- 
ness of the Atane and Patoot series (Senonian) is not less than 
1,300 feet and may considerably exceed this. 
The Tertiary elastics at Atanikerdluk attain a thickness of 
not less than 1,500 feet, not including the intruded basalts at 
least 200 feet thick. The horizon of most of the plants de- 
scribed by Hear as Miocene is assumed to be near the base of 
that series, the demarkation of which appears to be purely 
arbitrary.* It is more probable that the age of the plants 
now generally conceded by paleobotanists to be Oligocene 
may even be Eocene instead of Miocene. No remains of 
marine animals have as yet been discovered with these plants. 
The Tertiary clastic zone appears to be thinner west of 
Atanikerdluk, and at Patoot and Atane it is presumably rep- 
resented by the upper sandstone horizon 200 to 300 feet in 
thickness. At the western end of the peninsula its presence is 
established in the occurrence of "Atanikerdluk" plants. On 
the north coast east of Niakornat there may be a slight devel- 
opment of this zone, and it evidently is represented in the in- 
terior east of Kook. 
The systematic dififcrentiation of the described plant ma- 
terial from the Greenland Cretaceous, by means of which so 
important a distinction between the floras of the three series, 
*The conglomeratic sandstone at 1,000 feet above tide at Atanikerd- 
luk, assumed by the writers to be the base of the Tertiary at that point, 
is the only hypothetical lithological bench mark observed in any 
section. 
