120 Barrande and the Taconic System — Marcou. 
“Vertical transfer of the Primordial fauna of Sweden by James 
Hall;” and 3rd, to give conclusive evidence of the good determi¬ 
nation of Dr. Emmons for his Taconic fossils, referred by him ? 
as far back as 1844, as a special fauna. That paper of Barrande 
is a model of clearness, of straight forward opinions on the 
Taconic system, as well stratigraphic as paleontologic, and the 
most honest protest ever published on any controverted geolog¬ 
ical question. 
Barrande by dates, descriptions and reasoning has proved be¬ 
yond any possible doubt that Dr. Emmons has truly the priority 
over every body, even himself, on the question of the first dis¬ 
covery of the Primordial fauna, contained in strata which 
Emmons has called the Taconic system and which he has placed 
at its proper position in the stratigraphic scale, below the Cham¬ 
plain and as pre-Potsdam. And to think that such an honest 
and illustrious geologist, who has rendered to American geology 
such services and shown such a cosmopolitan spirit and such an 
unprejudiced and noble mind should be taxed of having intro- 
duced“eonfusion” into American geology, by a writer of a Man- 
nal of Geology for schools, who has failed during fifty years to 
recognize twenty-five thousand feet of strata as older than 
the Champlain system and the Potsdam sandstone, is a feat 
without a precedent. 
Barr aide’s doctrine of Colonies. —As to the supposition 
that if Barrande “had been within reach of the stratigraphical 
problem, he would have withheld his general conclusion” it is 
simply a last expedient of an adversary of the Taconic forced 
in his last entrenchment. For Barrande, from the first moment 
he took the Taconic question into his hands, called my atten¬ 
tion to his “doctrine des colonies,” telling me that very likely 
there was something of that sort in the Taconic area. At first 
I was opposed to the doctrine, as it will be seen in my two 
papers of 1860 and 1861, in which no reference whatever is 
made to it. But conviction came little by little, by direct re¬ 
searches at Pointe Levis, St. Albans bay, Swanton and Phillips- 
burgh; first recognizing the lenticular character of all the 
limestones inclosed in the slates, a great step to disentangle the 
complicated stratigraphy of the whole Taconic area, and sec¬ 
ondly afterwards pointing out the prophetic types and colonies 
of the second fauna, found by me now and then, never contin- 
