Report of the Sub-Committee on Cenozoic 
(Marine). 
EUGENE A. SMITH, 
EEPORTER. 
Notwithstanding the fact that marine Tertiary deposits have 
long been known to form an almost continnous border along the 
Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Florida, and along the Gulf 
coast from Florida to Texas, our knowledge of the Tertiary of 
America, in the language of Professor Dall, is still so frag- 
mentary and imperfect as to render a synchronic subdivision of 
the post-Cretaceous strata impossible for the present. 
Many papers descriptive of these Tertiary formations and 
especially of their fossil contents have been published from time 
to time, and fairly complete descriptions of the deposits in partic- 
ular States have been given to the world, as by Tuomey in South 
Carolina, Hilgard in Mississippi, by Tuomey, Smith and others 
in Alabama. While all these papers contain partial correlations 
and comparisons, in Professor Heilprin's U. S. Tertiary Geology, 
we have the only attempt thus far published at a systematic 
review and analysis of the formation taken as a whole. 
In Alabama the lower beds of the Tertiary are more exten- 
sively developed than elsewhere in the United States, and they 
have been recently carefully studied, so that the order of succes- 
sion, lithological characters, relative thickness, and the fossil 
contents of the various strata which make up this formation in 
Alabama along the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers where best 
exposed, are now known with a very considerable degree of accu- 
racy. For these reasons it is thought that a short account of the 
