86 'J'liC Ahicricd II (T(.'(>l(i<iisf. August , 1S95. 
On it Mr. Walcott has based a reconstruction of the Kewee- 
nawan, or "pre-Cambrian" continent, and, hiter, has calcu- 
lated the age of the world on the hypothesis that the sedi- 
ments were accumulated in accordance with its shore-lines, 
while the interior of the continent was elevated above the 
ocean* and was again submerged. 
SUPERIOR MISSISSIPPIAN IN WESTERN 
MISSOURI AND ARKANSAS. 
By Charles Eollix Keyes. 
It has long been thought that in the western part of the 
Ozark uplift the Lower Carboniferous rocks do not present a 
succession that can be readily paralleled with the more widely 
and better known sequence exhibited at the eastern extremity 
of the elevation. Along the Mississippi river, where the typ- 
ical section of the Lower Carboniferous rocks of the continen- 
tal interior may be regarded as occurring, there are now rec- 
ognized four ])rincipal members : the (1) Kinderhook, (2) 
Augusta, (3) St. Louis and (4) Kaskaskia. It has been 
generally considered that the last two of these are unrepre- 
sented in southwestern Missouri and on the western flank of 
the Ozarks, and it was this absence of the upper members of 
the series that gave the Lower Carboniferous of the district 
its apparently anomalous characters. 
Until quite recently very little more than the mere presence 
of Mississippian rocks has been known in southwestern Mis- 
souri and northwestern Arkansas. When the region first 
began to be studied with some detail a few years ago an en- 
tirely new classification of the rocks was proposed, new names 
were given to the dilferent members and no attempts were 
made to correlate the latter with the better known rocks of 
the same age further to the east. This radical departure from 
the usual classifactory scheme was due partly to a change in 
the lithological characters of tlie strata, partly to a misinter- 
pretation of facts and partly to insufficient familiarit}^ with 
the nearest beds of like age along the Mississippi river. 
*The North American Continent during Cambrian time, 12th Annual 
Report U. S. Geol. Survey, 1890-91, Plates XLII and XLIII: Correla- 
tion Pap3rs, Bulletin 81, 1891, Plates II and III: Geologic Time, as in- 
dicated by th e sedimentary rocks, Am. Geologist, vol. xii, p. 343. 
