;}08 l^he American (reo/uyist. May, 1897 
made known to geologists, and of the Paget Sound basin, 
and its prolonged axis toward the south as far as the basin 
of the lower Columbia. On the contrary, it appears* that a 
single series, occupying the low or axial part of the former 
basin rises in disrupted form in the foot hills of Mt. Rainer 
and the Cascades, and also of the Olympics. The present 
hydrography of the same basin and adjoining area has doubt- 
less been determined by oscillations of level and deformation. 
Nor, in the absence of paleontological evidence in Washing- 
ton for comparative purposes, is it indeed easy to discover 
physical grounds for correlating separately any of the Creta- 
ceous remnants thus distributed from the survivals of the Na- 
naimo group of Vancouver island, from the study of whose sev- 
eral survivals on that island and in the strait of Georgia has 
been gathered much knowledge of the Cretaceous littoral 
north of Puget sound, and its faunal relations. That prac- 
tically a continuous Cretaceous littoral extended from the 
strait of Georgia to the valley of the lower Columbia, and 
laterally across the present expanse of the Cascades and a 
part of the Olympics, seems at present the most logical ex- 
planation of the areal distribution of coal-bearing strata as 
hitherto recognized within these limits. Apart from the fact 
of the development of such strata west of the latitude of the 
sound beyond that hydrographic basin, the persistent thick- 
ness of the most westerly survival of the mountain series in 
the Puget Sound basin proper, as at Renton, serves to denote 
a much more remote western or expiring edge of the original 
series. 
Disruption of the coal-bearing series, together with the 
basal structure on which it was deposited, and its extravasa- 
tion by eruptives near well-known centres of maximum re- 
gional elevation, were doubtless incidental to successive earth 
movements in the course of which were reared the several 
coast ranges of Washington and British Columbia. Such 
movements from the end of the Cretaceous cannot have been 
brought to a marked suspension till at a period subsequent to 
deposition of the latest Tertiary carbonaceous strata on the 
north shore of the strait of Fuca, and again, as far as known, 
at the mouth of the Fraser, nor indeed to a close, as I shall 
proceed to show, till well up to the recent period. The limit- 
