384 The American Geologist. J""^' ^^*^^- 
Montreal, wherein he has stated that the "erroneous reference of this 
fauna to the Devonian was forced upon Sir WilHam [Dawson] by the 
findings of the stratigraphers/"t it becomes necessary for the writer to 
show something of the history of these "findings," since to him and to 
professor L. W. Bailey is chiefly due the assignment of the age re- 
quired by the stratigraphy. 
With this question is now involved the age of certain plant-bearing 
terranes in Nova Scotia, surveyed and mapped by Messrs. Hugh 
Fletcher and R. W. Ells, of the Canadian Geological Survey ; but in 
this communication the writer proposes to confine himself to the New 
Brunswick areas, and to mention the stratigraphical points bearing on 
the age of the plant bed as briefly as possible. 
The "Millstone grit" is well developed in New Brunswick, with 
floras at various points ; and visibly at almost all points where its bor- 
ders are exposed, is underlain by red shales and conglomerates with 
some Lower Carboniferous limestones. The gray rocks (Millstone 
grit) have been traced and surveyed by Drs. L. W. Bailey and R. W. 
Llls from a point about 30 miles north of St. John, eastward to the 
Joggins section in Nova Scotia. 
The underlying red shales and conglomerate above mentioned, or to 
use the Pennsylvania nomenclature, the Maunch Chunk shale, comes 
within three miles of St. John on the north and an outlier is found 
one mile to the southeast of the city. These rocks are inclined at low 
angles from the pre-Carboniferous complex on which they rest, and the 
outlier reposes upon the contact of the Mispec and Little River terranes 
linconformahly. 
In the valley of the Kennebecasis and the Pettecodiac rivers (which 
are continuous) extending northeast from St. John about eighty miles 
there appear at intervals beneath the equivalent of the Maunch Chunk 
red shales, bodies of gray and dark gray bituminous shale (near St. 
John mostly gray standstones) and underlying conglomerates, that were 
much eroded before the deposition of the red shales, etc. These gray 
shales contain at various points frequent remains of Ansimites acadica 
and Lcpidodcndrcn corrugatum, and are the equivalent of the Pocono. 
Down to the base of this series the sandstones are "free stones," 
that Ls they have not been filled with a secondary growth of silica be- 
tween the grains ; the plants in the shales retain their bitumen ; the 
limestones are not metamorphosed and the igneous effusives contain 
zeolites. Below this the sandstones are strongly cemented with silica 
and some calcite, the shales are converted into slates, the limestones 
are more crystalline, and the beds are usually tilted at high angles. 
The division between the rocks in these two conditions is the line of 
a great unconformity with discordance of dip, and usually strike as well, 
between the underlying and overlying measures. 
The first terrane below the unconfomity is the Mispec — Conglomer- 
ate and red slate. As this terrane contains rolled fragments of Silur- 
ian corals the whole series below it to the horizon of these corals must 
have been denuded before or during its formation. 
t Can. Rec. Sci. Vol. viii, p. 277. 
