Use of the Terms Laurentian and Newark.— Hitchcock. 199 
mental gneiss ; but it is clear that he took pains to derive the 
term from the Laurentide mountains. He says, (Report of 
Progress, Canada, for the year 1852-3, page 8), "it has been 
considered expedient to apply to them for the future, the more 
distinctive appellation of the Laurentian series, a name founded 
on that given by Mr. Garneau to the chain of hills which they 
compose." From his standpoint Laurentian was the proper 
term for the great system, and any use of a homophonous 
word for an insignificant terrane should not stand in its way. 
The geological public have thoroughly endorsed him. Prof. 
Dana used Laurentian for the Quaternary terrane in his pres- 
idential address before the A.A.A.S., in 1855, but later in his 
Matnial of Geology and el'feewhere uses the same word for the 
crystallines and Champlain for the clays. 
Is it not an axiom in geological nomenclature that if the 
proposer of a new term makes a mistake in orthography or 
etymology, it shall not debar the originator's claim to priority? 
In Agassiz's Nomenclator Zoologicus one recalls scores of 
instances in which an error of derivation is rectified, and the 
genus spelled differently from its first proposal, but it is still 
credited to its author. Now it was evidently intended to 
name this terrane after the St. Lawrence valle3^ Should it 
not, therefore, be more correctly written the St. Lawrencian 
terrane? The river is not the Lawrence river, whether written 
in French or English, and therefore the St. should be prefixed. 
It need hardly be added that Avith such correct rendering 
there would never be any conflict with the term Laurentian as 
applied to the crystalline system. 
Should it ever be found desirable to discard the name Lau- 
rentian, as applied to the older rocks because of its preoccupa- 
tion by another word, I would respectfully invite the attention 
of bibliographers to a term that precedes all others, viz., to 
Atlantic, as proposed by Featherstonhaugh in 1835. This 
gentleman in a report to the government upon the "Elevated 
country between Missouri and Red rivers," urged the necessity 
of giving a general name to the chain of mountains, as well as 
to the formations composing them, occupying the region of 
the primitive rocks of Maclure. It is the Blue Ridge, Alleghany 
mountains, etc. He says,^ "It will be apparent, I think, to 
every geologist, that as this primary chain is the true boundary 
of the sedimentary rocks lying west of it, and forms so impor- 
Featherstonhaugh's Report, 1835, p. 3.3, Second edition. 
