60 Correspondence. 
Mr. Lawson meets the natural objection, that in the original Lauren- 
tian are quartzytes and limestones, whose general characters and 
stratiform arrangement indicate that they are simply altered sedi- 
ments, by the suggestion that these will be found on careful examina- 
tion to bear the same relation to the great bulk of the granitoid 
gneisses that the upper Archean bears to the lower in the region 
northwestof lake Superior, i. e., that they are aimply included, isolated 
or disrupted portions of beds that normally belong above the gneiss, 
that have been covered by overflow. 
There are several points in Mr. Lawson's general scheme that are 
new, and some that at another time will be compared with results that 
have been reached by the Minnesota geological survey, with which 
they do not entirely agree. 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
The Taconic in the Salt Range op Punjab (India). Two letters 
which I have just received from India and England establish beyond 
any doubt the existence of the primordial fauna in the Salt Range 
mountains ; adding a third area of Taconic rocks in Asia (one in China 
and another in Siberia). Mr. A. B. Wynne in his very remarkable 
memoir: "Geology of the Salt Range of Punjab" 1878 Mem. Geol. 
Surv. India, vol. xiv, Calcutta) at p.p. 68 and 86, refers some beds 
containing Oholus and some other eai-liest forms of brachiopoda to the 
Silurian. The fossils were determined by that excellent and much 
lamented paleontologist and geologist, the late Dr. F. Stoliczka. 
In 1878, Dr. A. Waagen, the successor of Stoliczka as paleontologist 
of the geological survey of India, expressed an opinion entirely differ- 
ent, regarding the "boulder or Oholus beds" as Lower Carboniferous, 
saying that the "small brachiopod most nearly allied to Oholus, from 
which Wynne has concluded prematurely that the beds are Silurian" 
Avas not well determined. (See "geographical distribution of fossil 
organisms in India," p. 276 in Rec. Geol. Surv. India, vol. xi, Cal- 
cutta.) 
Following his view Dr. Waagen in the introduction of his great work 
on "the Salt Range fossils," p. 3, Calcutta, 1879, places the "06o?h« 
beds" in his "Productus limestone" of the Carboniferous sj'stem, and 
in order to support this new departure he did not hesitate to create in 
1885 four new genera. Neobolus, which does not possess any real 
biological difference from the genus Obolus, Schizopholis, Daridsonella, 
and Discinolepsis; and finally he described also two new Lingula. All 
that little brachiopod fauna is figured and described at great length in 
his "Productus-limestone fossils," at p. p. 748-770. All that fauna, 
five genera and eight species, composed exclusively of Taconic 
forms of brachiopoda, most characteristic of the primordial brachio- 
poda of North America and Europe is placed, without hesitation by 
Dr. Waagen, in the Carboniferous system, third division, at the base, of 
