Barrande and the Taconic System — Marcou. 121 
uously, in the Pointe Levis and Phillipsburgh group as far back 
as 1862, and published that year in my “Letter to M. Joachim 
Barrande, etc.,” Cambridge. Several years after, during 1873 
and 1874, I recognized the same existence of prophetic types 
and colonies in the Swan ton or Citadel Hill of Quebec slates 
group, and published my observations in 1880, in my paper, 
under the significant and very appropriate title of “Sur les colo¬ 
nies dans les roches Taconiques des bords du Lac Champlain” 
{Bulletin Soc. geol., France, tome ix, p. 18). 
The last paper received the full approbation of Barrande, as 
it will be seen in his letter of the 10th of March, 1882, a part 
of whieh I have published in the Proceed . American Acad. 
Science, vol. xii, p. 220, Cambridge, 1885; and it will be sus¬ 
tained even more by numerous quotations in his last memoir, 
“Defense des Colonies,” which will soon be published as a post¬ 
humous work of Barrande by the “Musee Boheme.” 
If Barrande had investigated and explored the Taconic area 
from Pointe Levis and Quebec city to Phillipsburgh, Swanton, 
Highgate, Georgia, Bald mountain, Williamstown and Pough¬ 
keepsie, he would have recognized at first the existence of 
colonies, on account of his long practical experience of that 
phenomenon in the strata of Bohemia, and he would have advo¬ 
cated with all his power, as a writer and an observer of genius, 
as he was, the acceptation of the Taconic system of Dr. Em¬ 
mons, with the addition only of that small and local group of 
the Potsdam sandstone. 
I do not say that he would have extinguished all opposition, 
and removed all wounded self-love; for the reputation of being 
a good observer or a bad one hangs over the heads of all those 
concerned in the Taconic question, friends or adversaries; and 
the resistance he encountered to the acceptance of his “doctrine 
des colonies” in Bohemia, first from the Bohemian geologists, 
Zippe and Krejci, secured from the officials of the Geological 
Survey of Austria Haidinger and Lipoid, third from the pro¬ 
fessors of paleontology at the school of Mines and the Jardin 
des Plantes in Paris, d’Archiac and Bayle, and finally from the 
messenger, Mr. John E. Marr, sent to Bohemia from Cambridge 
University, England, by the successor of Sedgwick, Mr. T. Mc- 
Kenny Hughes, prove that prejudices and error “die hard.” 
The final verdict on the Taconic. —But with all the papers 
