Correspondence. 201 
1811-1813, where the disturbances were severe and often destructive. 
Unfortunately this record is no longer in existence. 
It was my fortune in 1891 to traverse a considerable part of what 
may be called the epicentral area of the New Madrid earthquake, and 
to trace certain of its geographic- and other efifects. These include 
fissures in both bluffs and bottom-lands, those in the blufifs being 
simple chasms generally cleaving ridges or paralleling scarps, and still 
remaining open sometimes to depths of three to five feet ; while the fis- 
sures in the bottom-lands are usually marked by banks of gravel erupt- 
ed from earlier Columbia deposits beneath the Port Hudson clays, 
some of these gravel banks being fifty to one hundred feet wide, 
hundreds of yards long, and three to ten feet high. Still more 
striking, of course, are Reelfoot lake, east of the river, and the "sunk 
country." which replaces a river system (Whitewater) on the west; 
but to my mind the most impressive phenomenon of all is the lifted 
country lying athwart the valley of the great river a few miles below 
New Madrid. This area may be likened to a low elliptical dome, 
springing from the western shore of Reelfoot lake and the eastern 
border of the sunk country; it measures some twenty miles in width 
from east to west, and thirty or forty miles in transverse diameter; 
its hight, estimated from the elevation above the river in comparison 
with the hight of banks above and below, may be twenty or twenty- 
five feet. The various phenomena still traceable orv the ground have 
been repeatedly described in lectures; and an abstract of one of these, 
under the title "A Fossil Earthquake," was published in Bull. Geol. 
Soc- Am., Vol. 4, 1892, pp. 41 1 -414. W. J. McGee. 
IVashington, D. C, Aug. 14, 1902. 
PERSONAL AND SCIENTIFIC NE^WZS. 
j\Ir. H. O. Wood has been appointed assistant in mineralogy 
and petrography at Harvard University for the coming acade- 
mic year. 
Mr. T. T. Read, E. M. ( — '02 School of Mines, Columbia 
University) has been appointed instructor in mining and met- 
allurgy in the University of Wyoming". 
Mr. Wm. C. Phalen, M. S., of Gloucester, Mass., has been 
appointed an aid in the Department of Geology in the U. S. 
National Museum at Washington. Mr. Phalen is a graduate 
of the JMassachusetts Institute of Technology and was for two 
years engaged in teaching in the School of Mines, Socorro, 
New ]\Texico. He comes to the Museum luider the civil service 
regulations, and will have immediate charge of the petrographic 
collections. 
Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. 
Dr. Samuel Weidman, assisted by Mr. W. D. Smith, is engaged 
in mapping a district in the north central part of the state. 
The rocks of this area are of Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian age, 
