278 
EDWIN JAMES 
Thus he early discriminated the most essential physical character¬ 
istic of this wide-spread and singular deposit. Acting upon this 
determination Owen in later years aptly denominated the forma¬ 
tion the silicious marl. 
The stratigraphic feature which most impressively struck Doctor 
James upon reaching the Rocky Mountains was the wholly un¬ 
expected absence of the Transition beds and Primitive limestones , 
(Paleozoics) which should by all theories appear between the 
upturned sandstones of mountain front and the Primitive granites 
of the central massif. For this astounding circumstance he was 
utterly unable to offer any satisfactory explanation. On the 
bluffs of the Mississippi River below St. Louis he had, only a 
little while before, come to know these rocks missing in the 
Rockies and to recognize their fossils. That he did hot find his 
expectations fulfilled was to him both a very great surprise and 
a very deep mystery. However, his faith in Wernerism in which 
he had been so thoroughly schooled was badly shaken. Nor did 
he renew acquaintance with these Secondary limestones until 
he got back to the Ozark region in what is now Oklahoma. 
With wonderful breadth of mind and not a little astuteness 
James discussed the geological relations of the red sandstones 
which are abruptly upturned to form “hog-backs” along the Rocky 
Mountain front. Lithologically he compared them with the 
brown New Jersey freestones of which New York was built, 
and which we now designate as Triassic sandstones. From some 
organic remains which he found he paralleled the standstones 
with the Rothtodtliegendes of Germany, or the Permian as\we 
now know them, and the Bunter Sandstein, or Triassic of later 
nomenclature. Also he definitely correlated these rocks with the 
New Red Sandstone of England, — a determination which securely 
stands today after the elapse of a hundred years. On the return 
trip, down the Arkansas River, he passed for many hundreds of 
miles over these inhospitable red beds yet they were to him a 
constant source of new and fertile thought. 
Belonging to the Heroic Age of Geology, Doctor James nar¬ 
rowly escaped becoming one of its commanding figures. In that 
greatest of all historic controversies between the Neptunists and 
the Plutonists he was the only American who ever took conspicu¬ 
ous part. Had he been able to spread his telling observations before 
