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undisturbed and unaltered rocks of this age, including a thickness in some places of eighteen thousand feet, and extending from east to west through the Northern States of the Union and western Canada for nearly seven hundred miles, while it spreads from north to south from the northern part of Michigan far into the Middle States, is undoubtedly the most important Devonian area now known to geologists. 2. This area has been taken by all American geologists as their typical Devonian region. It is rich in fossils, and these have been thoroughly studied and admirably illustrated by the New York and Canadian Surveys. 3. The rocks of this area surround the basin of Lake Erie, and were named, in the original reports of the New York Survey, the "Erie Division." 4. Great difficulties have been experienced in the classification of the European Devonian, and the uncertainties thus arising have tended to throw doubt on the results obtained in America in circumstances in which such difficulties do not occur.

These reasons are, I think, sufficient to warrant me in holding the great Erie Division of the New York geologists as the typical representative of the rocks deposited between the close of the Upper Silurian and the beginning of the Carboniferous period, and to use the term Erian as the designation of this great series of deposits as developed in America, in so far at least as their flora is concerned. In doing so, I do not wish to introduce a new name merely for the sake of novelty; but I hope to keep before the minds of geologists the caution that they should not measure the Erian formations of America, or the fossils which they contain, by the comparatively depauperated representatives of this portion of the geological scale in the Devonian of western Europe.

OF

VII. ON THE RELATIONS OF THE SO-CALLED "URSA STAGE" BEAR ISLAND WITH THE PALÆOZOIC FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA.

The following note is a verbatim copy of that published by me in 1873, and the accuracy of which has now been vindicated by the recent observations of Nathorst :

The plants catalogued by Dr. Heer, and characterising what he calls the "Ursa Stage," are in part representatives of those of the American flora which I have described as the "Lower Carboniferous Coal-Measures" (Subcarboniferous of Dana), and whose characteristic species, as developed in Nova Scotia, I noticed in the "Journal of the Geological Society" in 1858 (vol. xv.). Dr. Heer's list, however, includes some Upper Devonian forms; and I would suggest that

either the plants of two distinct beds, one Lower Carboniferous and the other Upper Devonian, have been near to or in contact with each other and have been intermixed, or else that in this high northern latitude, in which (for reasons stated in my "Report on the Devonian Flora" *) I believe the Devonian plants to have originated, there was an actual intermixture of the two floras. In America, at the base of the Carboniferous of Ohio, a transition of this kind seems to occur; but elsewhere in northeastern America the Lower Carboniferous plants are usually unmixed with the Devonian.

Dr. Heer, however, proceeds to identify these plants with those of the American Chemung, and even with those of the Middle Devonian of New Brunswick, as described by me-a conclusion from which I must altogether dissent, inasmuch as the latter belong to beds which were disturbed and partially metamorphosed before the deposition of the lowest Carboniferous or "Subcarboniferous" beds.

Dr. Heer's error seems to have arisen from want of acquaintance with the rich flora of the Middle Devonian, which, while differing in species, has much resemblance in its general facies, and especially in its richness in ferns, to that of the coal-formation.

To geologists acquainted with the stratigraphy and the accompanying animal fossils, Dr. Heer's conclusions will of course appear untenable; but they may regard them as invalidating the evidence of fossil plants; and for this reason it is, I think, desirable to give publicity to the above statements.

I consider the British equivalent of the lower coal-measures of eastern America to be the lower limestone shales, the Tweedian group of Mr. Tate (1858), but which have sometimes been called the "Calciferous Sandstone" (a name preoccupied for a Cambrian group in America). This group does not constitute "beds of passage" to the Devonian, more especially in eastern America, where the lower coal-formation rests unconformably on the Devonian, and is broadly distinguished by its fossils.

The above notes would not have been extended to so great length, but for the importance of the Erian flora as the precursor of that of the Carboniferous, and the small amount of attention hitherto given to it by geologists and botanists.

*"Geological Survey of Canada," 1871.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CARBONIFEROUS FLORA-CULMINATION OF THE ACROGENS-FORMATION OF COAL.

ASCENDING from the Erian to the Carboniferous system, so called because it contains the greatest deposits of anthracite and bituminous coal, we are still within the limits of the Palæozoic period. We are still within the reign of the gigantic club-mosses, cordaites, and taxine pines. At the close of the Erian there had been over the whole northern hemisphere great changes of level, accompanied by active volcanic phenomena, and under these influences the land flora seems to have much diminished. At length all the old Erian species had become extinct, and their place was supplied by a meagre group of lycopods, ferns, and pines of different species from those of the preceding Erian. This is the flora of the Lower Carboniferous series, the Tweedian of England, the Horton series of Nova Scotia, the lower coal-measures of Virginia, the culm of Germany. But the land again subsided, and the period of the marine limestone of the Lower Carboniferous was introduced. In this the older flora disappeared, and when the land emerged we find it covered with the rich flora of the coal-formation proper, in which the great tribes of the lycopods and cordaites attained their maxima, and the ferns were continued as before, though under new generic and specific forms.

There is something very striking in this succession of a new plant world without any material advance. It is like passing in the modern world from one district to another, in which we see the same forms of life, only represented by distinct though allied species. Thus, when the voyager crosses the Atlantic from Europe to America, he meets with pines, oaks, birches, poplars, and beeches of the same genera with those he had left behind; but the species are distinct. It is something like this that meets us in our ascent into the Carboniferous world of plants. Yet we know that this is a succession in time, that all our old Erian friends are dead and buried long ago, and that these are new forms lately introduced (Fig. 32).

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Conveying ourselves, then, in imagination forward to the time when our greatest accumulations of coal were formed,

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a b c d e f g

FIG. 32. Foliage from the coal-formation. a, Alethopteris lonchitica, fern (Moose River). b, Sphenophyllum Schlotheimii (Pictou). c, Lepidodendron binerve (Sydney). d, Asterophyllites foliosa (?) (Sydney). e, Cordaites (Joggins). f, Neuropteris rarinervis, fern (Sydney). 92 Odontopteris subcuneata, fern (Sydney).

and fancying that we are introduced to the American or European continent of that period, we find ourselves in a new and strange world. In the Devonian age, and even in the succeeding Lower Carboniferous, there was in the interior of America a wide inland sea, with forest belts clinging to its sides or clothing its islands. But in the coal period this inland sea had given

place to vast swampy flats, and which, instead of the oilbearing shales of the Erian, were destined to produce those immense and wide-spread accumulations of vegetable matter which constitute our present beds of bituminous and anthracite coal. The atmosphere of these great swamps is moist and warm. Their vegetation is most exuberant, but of forms unfamiliar to modern eyes, and they swarm with insects, millepedes, and scorpions, and with batrachian reptiles large and small, among which we look in vain for representatives of the birds and beasts of the present day.

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Prominent among the more gigantic trees of these swampy forests are those known to us as Sigillaria (Fig. 33). They have tall, pillar-like trunks, often several feet in diameter, ribbed like fluted columns, but in the reverse way, and spreading at the top into a few thick branches, which are clothed with long, grass-like leaves. They resemble in some respects the Lepidodendra of the Erian age, but are more massive, with ribbed instead of scaly trunks, and longer leaves. If we approach one of them more closely, we are struck with the regular ribs of its trunk, dotted with rows of scars of fallen leaves, from which it receives its name Sigillaria, or seal-tree (Figs. 34-37). If we cut into its stem, we find that, instead of

FIG. 33. Sigillaria, restored.
A, Sigillaria Brownii.
B, Sigillaria elegans.

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