VII.—The Cambrian Age of the Dictyonema Slates of New Canaan and Kentville, Nova Scotia

Extract

In his “Acadian Geology” (1868, 2nd ed., p. 563) Sir William Dawson figures Dictyonema Websteri and places it as a Silurian (Upper Silurian) species. In describing the slates from which the type-specimens of this species were obtained he writes:—“Passing from the Cobequid Mountains to the slate hills of the south side of the Bay” (meaning the Bay of Fundy), “in King's County, we find slates not very dissimilar from those of the Cobequids” (which he had described on the previous page, 562), “in the promontory northward of the Gaspereau River. Here the direction both of the bedding and of the slate structure is N.E. and S.W.; but the planes of cleavage dip to the S.E., while the bedding, as indicated by lines of different colour, dips to the N.W. These slates, with the quartzite and coarse limestones, are continued in the hills of New Canaan, where they contain crinoidal joints, fossil shells, corals, and in some beds of fawn-coloured slate beautiful fan-like expansions of the pretty Dictyonema, represented in fig. 196; very fine specimens of this fossil were found by the late Dr. Webster of Kentville. It was the habitation of thousands of minute polypes, similar apparently to those of the modern Sertularia. The general strike of the rocks in New Canaan is N.E. and S.W., and they extend from that place westward to the Nictaux River.