The Chouteau, Group— liowley W^ 
We have never collected in per.sou from the Choutean lime- 
el one bat have received fossils from it from other collectors. 
As to the other divisions of the series we have made thorough 
examinations of them, ranging through fourteen years and 
have collected five series of the beautiful fossils. 
At Louisiana, immediately underlying the base of the Bur- 
lington limestone, is about three feet of a yellow argillaceous 
sandstone filled with worm-like burrows and casts of brachio- 
pods, lamellibranchs, gasteropods, one goniatite and a peculiar fu- 
coid. Beneath this sandstone are, perhaps twenty-five to thirty 
feet of dove-colored shales, entirely destitute of fossils. 
The Lithographic limestone, forty or fifty feet in thickness, 
lies beneath the shales and is made up of thin layers of a very 
close-grained and hard, light-brown and pale-blue limestone, 
the strata increasing in thickness downward from an inch or 
two at the top to twelve or fourteen inches at the base. The 
material between the layers of limestone being yellow and to- 
ward the bottom but little harder than clay. 
The Lithographic sandstone rests on two or three inches of 
a soft cla3'-like shale or sandstone of a yellowish cast, this 
latter passing downward into fifteen or sixteen inches of a 
dark blue shale. 
A black shale of three feet in thickness underlies the blue 
shale and overlies aii oolitic limestone referred by Drs. Shu- 
mard and Swallow to the Coruiferous group but now known to 
be the equivalent of the Niagara. The black shales were re- 
ferred to the Hamilton by the same authors, though they failed 
to find a single fossil in the beds. However, as we have found a 
few remains and all identical with species from the shales above 
these beds, undoubtedly, form the base of the Chouteau group. 
The upper part of the Lithogra])hic limestone is destitute of 
fossils, the middle beds yield the plume-like Fdlcitea gracilis. 
In the two or three l>ase layers and in the yellow partings 
are found the characteristic fossils, while, higher up remains 
are scarce. In the' underlying yellow shales and often passing 
into the blue is an abundance of fossils but largely crushed and 
half-valved Bpecimens. 
About five inches from the top of the blue shale is a bone 
bed filled with bones, teeth and coprolites of fishes, sissociated 
with one or two species of sponges. 
