LONG-ISLAND DIVISION. 
275 
sarily in part flow beneath, and cut off the further transportation of much of the sedimentary 
matter in that direction. Eddies, or the still water between the currents, would keep drift¬ 
wood and plants floated from the south, within long, narrow, or moderate sized circular areas, 
until waterlogged so as to sink. The cold currents from the north, occupying the bottom to 
the east and northeast, would not be as favorable to the development of organic life, as the 
warm waters from the south were, before meeting the cold waters from the north. 
These consequences seem to flow necessarily from the permanent physical causes that have 
been mentioned, and that continued to act as long as a large portion of North America was 
beneath the waters of the ocean; and there are indubitable evidences that it continued in this 
state until after the deposition of the strata under consideration, from the earliest periods of 
geological chronology.* The same causes that have produced the transport of the depositions 
of the marl and cretaceous and the red sandstone periods of the Atlantic States, seem to 
have acted in a similar manner through the extensive region east of the Rocky mountains, in 
the deposition of strata of similar characters, age and fossils. Such formations have been 
seen and more or less described by Lewis and Clark, Maj. Long, Dr. Pitcher, Mr. Nicollai 
and myself.t 
Mr. Conrad, who has examined this formation with some care in the Southern States, Vir¬ 
ginia, Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama, says : 
“This widely extended series was first referred to the chalk of Europe by Vanuxem and 
Morton, and the latter author has amply illustrated the organic remains. He divides the sys¬ 
tem into three sections ; upper, middle and lower. The latter consists chiefly of greensand 
in New-Jersey and Delaware, and in limited localities in Maryland, South-Carolina and 
Georgia; but it is generally an impure limestone in the Southern States, with the same 
organic remains as those of the greensand. It is the substratum of all the prairie land of 
* The alternate deposition of land plants and marine depositions, which have been heretofore attributed to alternate 
elevation above, and depression beneath the waters of the ocean, will be shown to be capable of a satisfactory explana¬ 
tion on other grounds, when we come to treat of such formations. 
t The fossils of the cretaceous deposits of that part of the country may now be seen in some of the public collections. 
Many geologists have seen the Ammonites and Baculites collected by Dr. Pitcher. The Baculites of the Missouri, col¬ 
lected by Mr. Nicollai, are very beautiful; and he exhibited a suite of the fossils before the Second Meeting of the Asso¬ 
ciation of American Geologists, that left no doubt in the minds of the most skeptical, of the existence of such a formation 
there. I have examined the same formation on the waters of Red river, twelve hundred miles by water above its mouth, 
in the Choctaw country, where the calcareous part of the formation is a solid limestone in the vicinity of Fort Towson, 
underlying the prairies, which, in many places show the naked rock in horizontal strata, filled with the Gryphaa vomer, 
bushels of which may be picked up entire in some parts of the prairies, where the rock has been disintegrated and crumbled 
by atmospheric agencies. A more compact stratum lies below, containing Pectens, a long turriculatcd univalve, and a 
species of Scalaria, believed to be the S', sitlimani. This formation is overlaid in many places, by a series of sand deposits; 
and one is here strongly reminded of the sandy pine country between New-York and Philadelphia, by the general (eor 
tures of the country, the sand plains and hills, the timber growth, and the small streams of clear water, so different from 
the turbid and milky creek and even spring waters of most of the southern and southwestern country. Similar fossils 
occur in the prairies some distance to the west of Fort Gibson. A fine Baculite from that region was presented to me as 
a petrified chicken's Tieck. 
