194 Jlie American Geolofjist. Soptombor, 1897, 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
American Association for the Advancement of Science. The 
forty-sixth aonual meeting began at Detroit on August 9th. The death 
of Prof. Cope left the Association without a president and the vice-pres- 
ident, W J McGee took his place. After the usual preliminaries of the 
Association the sectional meeting began. By previous arrangement it 
had been settled that the geological section should suspend its meet- 
ings on Monday and Tuesday in oi-der to afford the geological society 
an opportunity to hold its meeting. Consequently after the general ses- 
sion on Friday the latter society met, with Prof. E. Orton, the president 
in the chair, and the proceedings opened with a paper by Prof. Simonds 
of the University of Texas, on the granite area of Burnet county in that 
state. In this an account was given of the granite quarries and bosses 
found on the Colorado river near the junction of the Llano. The rock 
contains feldspar, clear and milky quartz, and biotite mica. The speak- 
er after describing the country and its rocks entered on a comparison 
of the different opinions of Walcott, Hill, and Comstock regarding the 
age of this granite, and concluded in opposition to most previous writ- 
ers that it is of post-Carboniferous and po.ssibly of Cretaceous date. 
Mr. Bayley Willis followed with a paper on the Eocene and Miocene 
freshwater deposits of Washington. After describing the strata of that 
age on Puget sound, 5000 to 7000 feet thick, he showed how these had 
been folded, faulted and overthrust, as have the Paleozoic beds of the 
eastern part of the continent. The compressing however in the present 
case acted from the west instead of the east. During the consequent 
movement the coal beds acted as a slide and the roof slipped over the 
floor, crushing the coal to powder and leaving rounded masses in the 
midst of it. The coal varies from lignite with twelve per cent, of water 
to good steam coal with only three per cent, and this proportion of wa- 
ter is in inverse relation to the amount of disturbance that has taken 
place. 
The loess as a land deposit was the subject of a paper by J. A. Udden 
of Rock Island. The writer took the wide view of the loess, including 
iu it all forms and conditions of this material — that in the river valleys 
and that at all altitudes — and maintained that it was all due to wind- 
action and was an accumul.ation of dust carried in the atmosphere. He 
argued that its lack of assortment was conclusive proof that it was not 
of aqueous origin. This view of the subject was strongly combatted by 
some members who considered that the loess was due not entirely to a 
single agency. 
Dr. .J. W. Spencer presented a paper on the relation between subma- 
rine valleys and land declivities. He argued that the sea bottom was us- 
ually the continuation of the land surface under water and illustrated 
the doctrine by quoting the extension of submarine river valleys out to 
sea chiefly in the Antillean region. Their contours he argued proved an 
elevation of 8000 to 10000 feet in that region. Thus the Mississippi val- 
