EDWIN JAMES 
277 
of the continent of which, at a later date, Prof. J. D. Dana made 
so much, and which formed the basis of his famous theory of 
the permanancy of the continents. 
The remarkable way in which Doctor James kept himself 
abreast of his times in matters geological is amply attested by 
a single circumstance. He correctly and formally introduced 
into American geological literature Conybeare’s term Carbonif¬ 
erous within a few months of the English author's first usage of 
the title. Although his correlations were not always so exact as 
they might have been, in the main his arguments were invariably 
singularly valid. He directed especial attention to the fact that 
these rocks were absent between the Red Sandstones and the 
Primitive Granites along the Rocky Mountain front. In the 
eastern Ozarks he endeavored to separate from them the sparry 
dolomites which we now class as Cambric in age. One serious 
mistake that he made remained a stumbling block for almost fifty 
years to confuse geologists who worked in the region. The lime¬ 
stones of the Upper Coal Measurers, exposed along the Missouri 
River between the mouths of the Kansas and Platte Rivers, he 
paralleled with the Mountain Limestone, or Early Carbonic series, 
of the Mississippi River bluffs. Thus he was led to regard the 
coal deposits as disposed in a shallow basin, with the underlying 
limestone bending upwards and reaching sky on either side. In 
some of his conclusions concerning the distribution of the Car¬ 
bonic rocks he was also led astray by the earlier statements of 
Nuttall regarding the identifications of fossils with those described 
by Martin in the Petrifacta Derhiensia. 
Of the fluor deposits of Shawneetown, in southeastern Illinois, 
James gave lucid description. The occurrence since became one 
of the most important sources of this mineral in the United States. 
On his horse-back trip across country from St. Louis to the 
Council Bluff he identified the Coal Measures, and pronounced, as 
his opinion, that some day the deposits would prove to be of very 
great value, a prediction which, although resting upon very 
transslender observation, final developments showed to far surpass 
the most sanguine anticipations. Referring to the loess surmount¬ 
ing the Missouri River bluffs opposite the mouth of the Platte, 
he described it as “principally sand in the most minute state of 
division, but intermingled with remains of organized beings." 
