feo eOr DEVONIAN, FOSSILS COLLECTED IN WESTERN 
NEW YORK, WITH NOTES ON THEIR STRATI- 
GRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION. 
BY ARTHUR W. SLOCOM. 
The material upon which this paper is based, was collected during 
the month of September, 1904, and is now a part of the Paleonto- 
logical collections of this Museum. Especial effort was made while 
collecting, not only to obtain as complete a fauna as possible at each 
locality visited, but to have the number of specimens collected of 
the various species represent, as nearly as might be, their relative 
abundance at the different localities. 
In the Hamilton or Middle Devonian rocks of Western New York 
and Canada there are three well-defined beds of varying thickness 
but of constant lithological characters. The upper of these beds is 
a shale called the Moscow shale; the middle bed is a crystalline lime- 
stone varying in thickness from 1% to 3 feet, called the Encrinal 
limestone; and the lowest bed is the Hamilton shale. The Encrinal 
limestone is present at so many of the outcrops, and is so easily rec- 
ognized that it serves as a datum line for correlating the shales either 
above or below it. Atnone of the localities visited by the writer was 
there enough of the beds exposed to give any idea of the thickness of 
the series, but measurements made at other places by other authors 
show that in a general way the beds may be said to gradually thin 
out towards the West. Thus at *Utica, New York, where the meas- 
ure was obtained from a well, Prosser found a thickness of 1,142 feet. 
At the ,Livonia salt shaft in Livingston county, about 124 miles 
west of Utica, Luther reports the thickness of the beds as 517 feet, 
and at the {Crystal salt well near Wyoming, about 23 miles farther 
west, a thickness of 407 feet. At {Eighteen Mile Creek near Buffalo, 
about 45 miles west of Wyoming, Shimer and Grabau report that 
the beds measure only 76 feet. At {Thedford, Ontario, about 130 
miles still farther west, a thickness of 81 feet is reported by the same 
*Am. Geologist,.Vol. VI, p 202. 
T 47th N. Y. State Museum Report, p. 258. 
ft Bull. Geol. Soc. of Am., Vol. 13, p. 162. 
257 
