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THE MISSISSIPPIAN SERIES. In the interior the Mississippian is composed chiefly of limestones, with some shales, which tell of a clear, warm, epicontinental sea swarming with crinoids, corals, and shells, and occasionally clouded with silt from the land. In the eastern region, New York had been added by uplift to the Appalachian land which now was united to the northern area.
The sandy limestones of the Calciferous record the transition stage from the Cambrian when some sand was still brought in from shore. The highly fossiliferous limestones of the Trenton tell of clear water and abundant life. We need not regard this epicontinental sea as deep.
These are the new countries, geologically speaking, as well as humanly speaking. The great interior sea, epicontinental, the geologists call it, seems to have been fermenting and laboring for untold aeons in building up these parts of the continent.
We can hardly account for this except by a shallow-water connection between the two ancient epicontinental seas. It was perhaps along the coastal shelves of a northern land connecting America and Europe by way of Greenland and Iceland that the migration took place, so that the same species came to live in Iowa and in Sweden.
The epicontinental sea was shoaled and narrowed, and muds were washed in from the adjacent lands. THE TACONIC DEFORMATION. The Ordovician was closed by a deformation whose extent and severity are not yet known. From the St.
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