Long
Island to New Jersey, and the Long Island beds generally are related
to the older (Raritan, Amboy) beds of New Jersey, but the
lignite-bearing sands on the south merge into the formation next above,
vis., the Matawan. This Cretaceous zone is a narrow strip, striking northeast and southwest, crossed from New Jersey to Long Island.
Outcrops
that have become famous and have yielded plant remains are at Glen
Cove, Cold Spring, Great Neck, Lloyd Neck, and Sea Cliff. Cretaceous
fossils have been found in the drift in Brooklyn, at Flushing
(Cemetery), but their origin is, of course, problematical. The
Cretaceous beds have been folded and disturbed, and this vitiates
conclusions, so far as they are guided by depths. It would seem that if
the marine marls and greensands of Monmouth County, New Jersey, are
Upper Cretaceous, Long Island Cretaceous, in which they are absent, is
Lower Cretaceous, and did not experience during its Cretaceous history
as deep a submergence as the southern areas now included in New Jersey.
Succeeding
the Cretaceous the Tertiary deposits should be expected, but on Long
Island, however naturally it might be regarded as an areal prolongation
of New Jersey, and geologically assimilable to New Jersey, these
deposits are not represented very unmistakably. Of course, they may
have largely been removed by erosion, or Long Island may have been
withdrawn, through elevation, northward from the arena of Tertiary
sedimentation.
At
this stage of his study of the development of Long Island topography,
Mr. Veatch unfolds a scheme of reconstruction by which, through
erosion, at higher levels than at present, a hill and valley system was
wrought out. This had a continental significance. It was represented in
Long Island, in New Jersey, in Delaware, in Maryland, and had, it is
assumed, something to do with the final and recent courses of the
Connecticut, Delaware, and Potomac Rivers. The succession of events,
as pictured, was like this: The early Pliocene (Tertiary) was an
erosion interval; the softer Cretaceous
