320 O arhoniferous Glaciation^ Ete. — White. 
tan, of extensive boulder beds and conglomerates, lithologically 
resembling the Talchirs, underlying a great plant-bearing system 
with Vertehraria, a typical lower Gondwana plant, and resting 
conformably on richly fossiliferous marine terranes of Carbonif- 
erous age. The study of the paleontology of these beds may be 
looked to with great interest as affording a possible means for 
tracing the correlation and connection of the Gondwana sys- 
tem and the terranes of the Elburz and Armenia, and conse- 
quently with Europe and the north through the Herat beds 
and the plant-bearing beds of Turkestan. 
The second report, above referred to, is a short communica- 
tion by letter from Orville A. Derby in South America to Dr. 
Waagen.^ In it Dr. Derby says that a great paleozoic area 
exists in southern Brazil, which includes a great part of the 
Parana plain, and concerning which nothing, so to speak, has 
been published. This is covered to a great extent by a broad 
band of rock of Carboniferous or Permian age, or both, which 
contains few fossils. In the province of Parana he saw 
rounded fragments, ranging in size from a fist to four times 
the size of a man's head, buried in an extremely fine clay 
shale. Also in the province of Itu, on the river Juti, in Itap- 
etininga, and many other localities, in an extraordinarily fine- 
grained sandy shale, he found isolated rounded blocks, a foot 
and a half or more in diameter, of granite, gneiss, etc. On the 
Capavary river, boulders over a meter in diameter were dis- 
covered, resting in a matrix of Carboniferous clay shale. 
Although no striations were observed. Dr. Derby believes that 
an examination of the terranes by an experienced eye will, no 
doubt, disclose all the characteristic indications of glaciation. 
Certainly, in the absence of striations and other more deci- 
sively glacial characteristics, the evidence is far too unsatisfac- 
tory, when taken by itself, to warrant for a glacial agency any 
higher consideration than as .a possibility, even when taken in 
connection with the established glaciation in the other con- 
tinents of the southern hemisphere ; and while glaciation in 
the Africo-Indo-Australian terrane is an accepted fact, and 
that of Afghanistan and Turkestan a possibility, that of 
South America can only be regarded as an hypothesis. Never- 
1 Mittheihmg eines Brief vonHerrnA. Derby, iiber Spiiren einer Car- 
bonen Eiszeit in Siidamerika. Neues Jahrb. f. Min., 1888, vol. ii, Hft. 
2, pp. 172-176. 
