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in Iroquois and portions of adjoining counties (Vermillion, Champaign, Ford, McLean and Livingstone), over a known area of at least five hundred square miles. It is most frequently encountered beneath the till plain on the inner slope of the moraines which sweep around the artesian well district, at a depth of sixty to one hundred and ten feet, but is occasionally penetrated beneath moraines in Livingstone, McLean and Ford counties and is found along the outer border and slopes of moraines in Vermillion and Champaign counties. (3) In McHenry and Kane counties in the midst of a series of morainic ridges at depths varying from sixty to one hundred and eighty feet; the depth increasing with elevation.

2. Stratigraphic Distribution. It occurs both as an interglacial soil between tills, and below all the tills as if preglacial. Nowhere have more than two beds been penetrated in the same well section and usually but

one occurs.

The "Forest Bed" is known to be in situ : (1) By a leached subsoil. (2) By underlying sand beds containing molluscan shells. The subsoil has been found in the Mendota area leached to a depth of two to four feet, beneath which there is a calcareous till. The fossiliferous sands occur in abundance in the Iroquois area.

We have, in this vegetal bed, evidence of an interglacial vegetation having spread farther north than the south border of the morainic drift, showing that when these moraines were formed, the ice sheet had made an advance and that the moraines cannot be considered mere halting places in the retreat of the ice sheet.

RECENT DISCOVERIES OF ROCK-SALT IN KANSAS. BY ROBERT HAY, Assistant, U. S. Geological Survey, Junction City, Kansas.

[ABSTRACT.]

THE examination of salt marshes and salt springs in northern middle Kansas caused Professor Mudge, more than twenty years ago, to suggest that rock salt would be discovered in that region. Wells and borings of considerable depth in the coal measures of eastern Kansas and of the socalled Permo-carboniferous strata have yielded abundant streams of salt water. The discovery of rock gas in the eastern counties has recently stimulated speculative drilling in all parts of the state. The prospector's drill at Ellsworth, in August, 1887, struck rock salt at a depth of seven hundred and thirty feet. Before the end of the year rock salt had been pierced by the drill at Kingman, Hutchinson, Lyons and Anthony. A previous boring had shown salt shales at Caldwell. The beds of salt-there is more than one at each of these places-vary from twenty to one hundred and forty feet in thickness and they are accompanied by and intercalated with beds of salty shales, and, in one instance, beds of limestone.

At

Anthony and Kingman the surface rocks and all the way down to the salt the strata are of Triassic age. At Hutchinson these are overlain by one to two hundred feet of the alluvia of the Arkansas valley. This is also true at Sterling where salt has been reached, July, 1888. At Lyons the red beds (Trias) are also covered with alluvia and possibly some tertiary deposits. At Ellsworth, the Dacotah formations are well developed and the triassic red beds that were there had never before been suspected, for to the northeast the Dacotah formations rest on the Permo-carboniferous, yet in Kingman and Barber counties reduced thicknesses of the Dacotah rest on eroded red beds. But at Ellsworth, the salt is, as elsewhere, at the bottom of the red beds. In the region where the Dacotah is in contact with the Permian, a well marked gypsiferous horizon is found among the Upper Permian beds. In several of the salt borings a gypsiferous horizon is found from sixty to four hundred feet below the lower limit of salt in Permian strata.

The salt rock and accompanying saliferous shales form a saliferous horizon from three to five hundred feet thick, passing upward from the Permian into the Trias, apparently without break.

At the close of the Permian age, depression of the northeastern area was arrested and uplift commenced while south and west the sinking continued and the saliferous horizon and red beds were deposited all in shallow seas. The northeastern area was depressed to take, on its eroded surface of Permo-carboniferous strata, the earliest Dacotah formations; and the southern and western area was at that time elevated and eroded, becoming again depressed in time to extend the Dacotah area in that direction in some of its upper beds, including the lignite. The axis of oscillation has not yet been made out about which these movements turned, but it would seem that here we have unbroken succession from the Upper Carboniferous to the Dacotah on neighboring areas, through the saliferous and triassic rocks.

In Barber county and to the west and south in the Indian Territory is another gypsiferous horizon in the Upper Triassic strata. It is not impossible that the salt plains of the Cimarron and the salt pool in Meade county may be indications of another saliferous horizon above this. Kansas is going into the manufacture of salt on a large scale. At Kingman a shaft is being sunk to mine the salt. At Ellsworth, Lyons, Anthony and Sterling works are in progress of which the output will vary from one hundred and fifty to four hundred barrels per day. Hutchinson has already salt blocks in operation whose output reaches 1500 barrels per day, and others in progress which will treble that quantity. It is expected, within a year or two that Kansas salt will be the only salt sold west of the Mississippi river.

THE DISCOVERY OF FOSSIL TRACKS IN THE TRIASSIC OF YORK COUNTY, Pa. By ATREUS WANNER, York, Pa.

[ABSTRACT.1]

THE author of this paper announced that he had recently found fossil tracks and plants, probably algæ, in the trias of York Co., Pa. A slab from this newly discovered locality of Miameichnites was sent, by Mr. Wanner, to the National Museum in January, 1888.

Professor Hitchcock in commenting on the above paper, stated that he had seen the slab in the National Museum, and that he recognized upon it three species of Dinosaurs, belonging to the genus Anomœpus; also a probable species of Anisopus; all of them closely related to species of those genera long known in Massachusetts. These impressions, he stated, had not been seen south of the Delaware river in New Jersey and Pennsylvania prior to their recent discovery by himself.

He also added that he had a large amount of matter concerning footmarks in his possession, mostly descriptions of new species from Connecticut and New Jersey, which he hoped to make use of in a Revision of Ichnology. The time had come for a restatement of the facts of this science, and the investigations into the character of tracks made by living animals which were commenced by the late President Edward Hitchcock, thirty years since, will be continued by his son. The study of the tracks of crustacea was entered upon in January and February, 1888, in Florida. It was found that a considerable similarity exists between the amphipods and isopods and such genera as Acanthichnus, Bifurcalipes, Hexapodichnus and Climacodichnus of the Ichnology of Massachusetts. The discovery of Cheirotherium from Pennsylvania was announced by the writer in 1868. Additional specimens have since been found at Milford, N. J., now belonging to Lafayette College, Easton, Pa., which show a front foot of ornithic aspect. There seems to be a close relation between this supposed Cheirotherium and the Otozoum of New England. Other specimens supply needed information about the giant Polemarchus.

THE OIL FIELDS OF COLORADO. By Prof. J. S. NEWBERRY, Columbia College, New York.

[ABSTRACT.]

THE only oil field at present productive in Colorado is in the valley of the Arkansas about Florence, a new and growing town, thirty miles above Pueblo. The geology of this region is all Cretaceous. The table-lands bordering the Arkansas valley are composed of the shales and sandstones of the Laramie group which contain valuable seams of coal now largely mined at Coal Creek near Florence for the supply of Pueblo, Denver and the Prairie country toward the east.

The Arkansas river cuts through the Laramie exposing the top of the

1 The paper will be printed in the Report of the State Geologist of Pennsylvania.

Colorado group; here for the most part dark bituminous shales which have been proved, by boring, to be over 3000 feet in thickness. The oil emanates from the depth of from 1200 to 1500 feet from the surface. About forty wells have been bored within a radius of two or three miles about Florence. Nearly all have yielded oil, but in very different quantity; from two or three up to one hundred and twenty barrels per day. Fourteen wells are now being pumped and the average product is about sixty barrels to the well; so that the present aggregate yield of the wells is about one thousand barrels per day.

The oil is of very excellent quality, light green in color, having a gravity of about 31% Beaumé and has rather an agreeable odor. When distilled it yields 40% of burning fluid and nearly 60% of lubricating oil. The burning fluid is "water white" and has almost nothing of the pungent odor which characterizes our Eastern kerosene. The lubricating oil is of better quality than that furnished by the Pennsylvania wells. It contains so large an amount of paraffine that it becomes pasty at zero temperature. This is a slight objection to its use in the natural state, but is a fault which can be easily corrected whenever the weather becomes cold enough to make it necessary.

The origin of the oil can hardly be a matter of doubt. It is produced by the spontaneous distillation of carbonaceous shales as is the oil of western Pennsylvania, though the geological ages are very different. All the productive territory in the Arkansas oil field is controlled by a syndicate called the Union Oil Company. It owns the land or oil right over more than fifty thousand acres and could apparently increase the production of oil to any desired extent. Now the burning fluid supplies the markets of all the Rocky Mountain region from Montana to Mexico, but the sale of the lubricating oil is prevented by artificial competition. Many thousand barrels are stored and it will ultimately find an outlet by way of the Gulf of Mexico if other channels are closed to it. At present it is only used for fuel under the stills and the boilers of the pumping engines. It is blown into the furnaces with a jet of steam and is a model fuel, but its consumption in this manner is a great sacrifice as it is intrinsically much the most valuable product of the wells.

THE AGE AND CORRELATION OF THE MESOZOIC ROCKS OF THE SERGIPEALAGOAS BASIN OF BRAZIL. By Prof. JOHN C. BRANNER, State Geologist of Arkansas, Little Rock, Ark.

[ABSTRACT.]

In his "Contributions to the Paleontology of Brazil,” Dr. C. A. White describes the mesozoic fossils collected by the author in the Sergipe-Alagoas basin of Brazil. Upon the evidence offered by these fossils Dr. White refers the Sergipe beds to the Cretaceous. He admits, however, that some

of the species have a jurassic aspect, though none of them are identiflable with known jurassic species. Professor Alpheus Hyatt was also struck by the jurassic aspect of some of the cephalopods brought from this region by Professor Hartt in 1869. The author calls attention to the fact that of three beds yielding fossils, and from which collections were most complete, one of them lying at the base of the three, yields most of the fossils of jurassic aspect, an overlying bed yields fossils of cretaceous aspect alone, while the uppermost bed again yields fossils of cretaceous and jurassic aspect.

In referring the beds of this basin to the Cretaceous Dr. White says that while such a conclusion would, he thinks, have been reached from a study of the fossils alone, much reliance has been placed on the corroborative testimony of the geologists of the Brazilian Survey. We have no stratigraphic evidence whatever, throwing light upon the age of these beds. The overlying deposits have been referred to the Tertiary simply because they do overlie these deposits which have been referred to the Cretaceous. Underlying beds have been referred to the Paleozoic, but without any paleontologic evidence.

By Prof. JOHN BRAN

THE AGE OF THE CRYSTALLINE ROCKS OF ARKANSAS.
NER, State Geologist of Arkansas, Little Rock, Ark.

[ABSTRACT.]

GEOLOGICAL maps of the United States represent a small area about Little Rock, Arkansas, and another small area in the southwestern part of the state as Archæan. A recent examination of the crystalline rocks of these and other similar regions in Arkansas shows that none of these rocks are Archæan. They have all been injected into paleozoic strata, and have branching dykes penetrating overlying beds from the principal masses. The exact age of these crystalline rocks has not been determined, for the paleozoic beds into which they were injected have been so completely metamorphosed that they retain no paleontologic evidence of their age. On account of their stratigraphic relations I am inclined to refer most of these sedimentary and metamorphic rocks to the Lower Carboniferous.

THE PERIDOTITES OF PIKE COUNTY, ARKANSAS. By Prof. JOHN C. BRANNER, and R. N. BRACKETT, Little Rock, Ark.

[ABSTRACT.]

DR. OWEN in the second volume of his Geological Reports on Arkansas mentions a small area of igneous rock in Pike county. Geological map-makers appear to have referred this rock to the Archæan. Recent

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