rocks,
whereby the clays and siliceous sands have been separated in
comparative purity in distinct but variously alternating beds.
These
cretaceous layers have been largely buried up beneath drift material,
or possibly in places disarranged and crowded into confused and
misleading positions by the glacial push. They have been penetrated by
iron waters which have cemented their sands and gravels into coarse
conglomerates.
The
Cretaceous formation as a whole embraces a number of beds overlying one
another upon a gently sloping plane which was produced seaward along
the present coast line of northern New Jersey, and which crossed that
State, extending southward. Clays, marls, sands, and iron sediments
were deposited in the cretaceous sea, and the plastic clays of the
Raritan River were either amongst the earliest of the cretaceous beds
or belong to the end of the preceding formation. These beds, well
represented near Matawan, New Jersey, and bearing a somewhat
distinctive fossil fauna, form presumably the cretaceous areas of
Staten Island. Amongst floral remains found in the clay beds at
Kreischerville, Staten Island, were evidences of Sequoia, Widdingtonites, Eucalyptus, and Proteoides, plants
belonging to this period, and expressive at least of a semi-tropical
climate. At Tottenville, Princess Bay, and Arrochar hardened clay
spheres and concretions, doubtless torn from underlying cretaceous
beds, and now distributed in the overlying drift accumulations, contain
plant remains also, as made out by Dr. Hollick, distinctly cretaceous,
being Liriodendropsis, Laurus, Thrimfeldia, Sapindus, Mariconia. These
masked or covered cretaceous beds are probably gently rolling, and were
marked by some unevenness and by synclinal troughs or basins. Where
these beds approach the surface their fossils have become mingled with
the superincumbent drift, where deeply removed, the heavy covering of
drift completely conceals the latter.
But the evidence, the unmistakable included testimony of numerous plant remains, has in very recent years reached dis-
