10 
LEA’S DESCRIPTION OF A FOSSIL SAURIAN 
Hudson rivers, lie mentions the fact that it forms a gently inclined plane, descending 
from its source in Carolina several hundred feet above the sea to its estuary on a level 
with the ocean. A full account of Prof. Rogers’ views will be found in his New Jersey 
report, and the facts and observations adduced by him strongly recommend the 
acceptance of his theory. Certainly the position of the deposit and its mineral contents 
would go to sustain his ideas, but the fact that we have not the evidence of its being 
a fresh water deposit would induce us to have some hesitation on the subject. It 
would seem that from its inclined position and its forming a broad estuary in an arm 
of the sea, that it must necessarily have been of fresh water origin ; hut in its organic 
remains, the paucity of which is remarkable, we have no evidence to that effect. The 
numerous bird, Batrachian and Saurian tracks, represent the littoral character of its 
condition, as the ligneous coal also does. The Saurian bones mentioned bv Mr. 
Wells, of which there has been some doubt expressed, and those of the Clepsysaurus 
described by me, may have belonged to species living either in fresh or salt water. 
There seems to be no reason to doubt of the red sandstone formation of the Connec¬ 
ticut Valley being of the same period with that which sweeps through the Middle 
States to New York. It consists of a narrow belt, commencing in the Valley within 
four miles of the Vermont State line, and passing south through Massachusetts it 
terminates in Connecticut, where it is supposed by Prof. Adams, that “ the Connecti¬ 
cut River emptied into a long narrow bay, which reached up from Long Island 
Sound, nearly to, or quite over the southern line of Vermont and in which the sand¬ 
stone deposits accumulated.”* He considers that most of this deposit had its origin 
in the rocks of the State of Vermont, as Prof. Hitchcock had found some of the coarse 
conglomerates near to that State to contain pebbles derived from Vermont rocks, and 
which some geologists regarded as indicating violent freshets. Prof. Hitchcock had 
considered it perhaps in the same light, as he viewed it as a tidal estuary. But, if 
this long narrow bay extended from Long Island Sound to the northern terminus of 
the deposit, it would prove the marine origin of the formation. I should doubt this, 
and would rather refer it to the same cause as that of the more South-Western deposit 
of which I have been treating. It would seem to me that both deposits had their 
origin in a district several hundred feet above tide water, and the waters flowing down 
an inclined plane deposited the debris according to dynamic laws. This view of the 
facts would tend to prove the fresh water origin of the formation, and I would be 
inclined to look rather for such organic remains as would sustain such an origin. 
Prof. Mather in the New York Reports, does not agree in the view of the fluvia- 
tile origin of these red rocks, but considers them to have been deposited by the action 
of tw r o oceanic currents, the polar and equatorial, flowing in opposite directions on the 
ancient coast of the Middle States, the meeting of which currents, regulated by known 
* Second Geological Survey of Vermont, p. 100. 
