The Elements of Geology

by William Harmon Norton

The Helderberg is a transition epoch referred by some geologists to the Silurian. The thin sandstones of the Oriskany mark an epoch when waves worked over the deposits of former coastal plains. The limestones of the Corniferous testify to a warm and clear wide sea which extended from the Hudson to beyond the Mississippi. Corals throve luxuriantly, and their remains, with those of mollusks and other lime-secreting animals, built up great beds of limestone. The bordering continents, as during the later Silurian, must now have been monotonous lowlands which sent down little of even the finest waste to the sea.

In the Hamilton the clear seas of the previous epoch became clouded with mud. The immense deposits of coarse sandstones and sandy shales of the Chemung, which are found off what was at the time the west coast of Appalachia, prove an uplift of that ancient continent.

The Chemung series extends from the Catskill Mountains to northeastern Ohio and south to northeastern Tennessee, covering an area of not less than a hundred thousand square miles. In eastern New York it attains three thousand feet in thickness; in Pennsylvania it reaches the enormous thickness of two miles; but it rapidly thins to the west. Everywhere the Chemung is made of thin beds of rapidly alternating coarse and fine sands and clays, with an occasional pebble layer, and hence is a shallow-water deposit. The fine material has not been thoroughly winnowed from the coarse by the long action of strong waves and tides. The sands and clays have undergone little more sorting than is done by rivers. We must regard the Chemung sandstones as deposits made at the mouths of swift, turbid rivers in such great amount that they could be little sorted and distributed by waves.

Over considerable areas the Chemung sandstones bear little or no trace of the action of the sea. The Catskill Mountains, for example, have as their summit layers some three thousand feet of coarse red sandstones of this series, whose structure is that of river deposits, and whose few fossils are chiefly of fresh-water types. The Chemung is therefore composed of delta deposits, more or less worked over by the sea. The bulk of the Chemung equals that of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To furnish this immense volume of sediment a great mountain range, or highland, must have been upheaved where the Appalachian lowland long had been. To what height the Devonian mountains of Appalachia attained cannot be told from the volume of the sediments wasted from them, for they may have risen but little faster than they were worn down by denudation. We may infer from the character of the waste which they furnished to the Chemung shores that they did not reach an Alpine height. The grains of the Chemung sandstones are not those which would result from mechanical disintegration, as by frost on high mountain peaks, but are rather those which would be left from the long chemical decay of siliceous crystalline rocks; for the more soluble minerals are largely wanting. The red color of much of the deposits points to the same conclusion. Red residual clays accumulated on the mountain sides and upland summits, and were washed as ocherous silt to mingle with the delta sands. The iron- bearing igneous rocks of the oldland also contributed by their decay iron in solution to the rivers, to be deposited in films of iron oxide about the quartz grains of the Chemung sandstones, giving them their reddish tints.

Life of the Devonian

Plants. The lands were probably clad with verdure during Silurian times, if not still earlier; for some rare remains of ferns and other lowly types of vegetation have been found in the strata of that system. But it is in the Devonian that we discover for the first time the remains of extensive and luxuriant forests. This rich flora reached its climax in the Carboniferous, and it will be more convenient to describe its varied types in the next chapter.

Rhizocarps. In the shales of the Devonian are found microscopic spores of rhizocarps in such countless numbers that their weight must be reckoned in hundreds of millions of tons. It would seem that these aquatic plants culminated in this period, and in widely distant portions of the earth swampy flats and shallow lagoons were filled with vegetation of this humble type, either growing from the bottom or floating free upon the surface. It is to the resinous spores of the rhizocarps that the petroleum and natural gas from Devonian rocks are largely due. The decomposition of the spores has made the shales highly bituminous, and the oil and gas have accumulated in the reservoirs of overlying porous sandstones.

Invertebrates. We must pass over the ever-changing groups of the invertebrates with the briefest notice. Chain corals became extinct at the close of the Silurian, but other corals were extremely common in the Devonian seas. At many places corals formed thin reefs, as at Louisville, Kentucky, where the hardness of the reef rock is one of the causes of the Falls of the Ohio.

Sponges, echinoderms, brachiopods, and mollusks were abundant. The cephalopods take a new departure. So far in all their various forms, whether straight, as the Orthoceras, or curved, or close-coiled as in the nautilus, the septum, or partition dividing the chambers, met the inner shell along a simple line, like that of the rim of a saucer. There now begins a growth of the septum by which its edges become sharply corrugated, and the suture, or line of juncture of the septum and the shell, is thus angled. The group in which this growth of the septum takes place is called the Goniatite (Greek gōnia, angle).