The Taconic — Marcou. 83 
No. 6 and no explanation whatever. On the section, instead of 
being under No. 6, it is marked No. 4: and the No. 6 of the 
section is the gneiss or pre-Cambrian according to Mr. Wal- 
cott's phraseology ; another needless confusion. 
Mr. Walcott says : " Dr. Emmons' errors are nearly all trace- 
able to his trust in the lithologic characters;" and Mr. C. H. 
Hitchcock says: "His j^ala^ontological arguments were better 
than tlie stratigraphical ones." A disagreement of opinion be- 
tween two of the adversaries of Emmons, who have made, both 
of them, errors far superior to any ever made by Dr. Emmons; 
for Emmons' errors are simply errors of detail in a difficult 
study, and at the beginning of it — errors of a pioneer only in 
the opening of a new and splendid road; while Messrs. Walcott 
iind Hitchcock's errors affect the whole system, and besides are 
made forty-four years after Emmons' discoveries and splendid 
works, twenty-seven years after Barrande's letters to Marcou 
and twenty-five years after Marcou's " Comparative tabular sec- 
tions" of the Taconic with all its groups, for the northwest 
part of Vermont and the vicinity of Quebec. 
As to what Mr. Walcott says, "that there was no valid strati- 
graphical evidence of the jDre-Potsdam age of the Black slates " 
where Dr. Emmons got the two species of trilobites, first found 
by Dr. Fitch near Bald mountain in 1S43, it is simply an as- 
sumption on his part that he is right in his reference of the Black 
slates, or any part of them, to the Utica slates, when on the 
contrary all those slates belong to the Upper Taconic. Mr. 
Walcott in his paper reproaches Dr. Emmons with committino- 
errors constantly, when it is he who is erroneous, very confused 
and inexact. 
But furthermore, Mr. Walcott says: "Dr. Emmons was not 
a collector of fossils." Nothing is more unjust and untrue. 
Dr. Emmons found more fossils than anybody else amono- his 
contemporaries; for then it was not so easy as it is for Mr. 
Walcott with dynamite explosives, fresh cuts for railroads in all 
directions, new and numerous quarries, to collect fossils where 
Emmons did not find any. It is no small compliment for 
Emmons to say that even his American geology^ an elementary 
book, contains plates, figures and descriptions of fossils which 
very lately have been copied verbatim and reproduced bv the 
