Licking County, Ohio - Chapter 20: Mineralogy and Paleontology, 1881

'Arts perfect forms no moral need, And beauty is its own excuse ; But for the dull and flowerless weed Some healing virtue still must plead, And the rough ore must find its honors in its use." - Whittier.

"Mineralogy has an admirable and extensive development in Flint ridge. There the mineralogical manifestations are not only diversified, but also highly interesting. Among the stones, rocks, ores, metals, clays, earths and minerals found on and in Flint ridge are the flint or buhr-stone, the sand-stone, the hornstone, the lime-stone, the oil-stone, the conglomerate rock, the iron ore, the granite boulder, fire-clay, blue-clay shale, slaty clay, potter's clay, slate, bituminous slate, bituminous coal, and cannel coal.

"The economic value of some of the foregoing deposits has been considerable, at different times. To the aboriginal inhabitants the flint-stones of the ridge must have been of great value, as from them they made, during many passing ages, their knives, spear and arrow heads, and perhaps other implements and ornaments. The flint of the ridge was, for many years, extensively manufactured into mill-stones, or what millers called "'buhrs," and liberal profits were realized, but of late years this branch of manufacture has been abandoned, the French buhr being found superior in quality. Moreover, the best quality of the flint of the ridge, which alone was suitable for buhrs, was mainly worked out, and what remains is not attainable, or, at least, is not so readily quarried as to justify the continued profitable prosecution of the aforesaid industry. In many mills, however, in early times in Ohio, and until a comparatively recent period, the Flint ridge buhrs were used, and found to be an economical and excellent substitute forthe French buhr, particularly for grinding corn, rye and buck-wheat. It is also said that the purer portions of the flint made good oil-stones, and when crushed also served a valuable purpose in turing glass, and, I believe, also fire-brick.

"The iron ore of Flint ridge has probably not been found sufficient in quantity, nor of such quality as to admit of exmanufactensive utilization, by the erection of furnaces; and it is too re+

Paraphine, three and three-fourths to five pounds. When crude petroieum was placed upon the market at two cents per gallon in 1861-62, this branch of industry was of of the Licking County Cannel Coal company, more than a mile from the western termination of the ridge, at a point, says Professor Read, about one hundred feet, by his barometer, and one with the coals, shales and fire-clays, the following section: Earthy lime-stone, two and one-half feet; Pure lime-stone, two and one-half feet; Cannel coal, one foot; Fire-clay, three feet; Cannel coal, four feet; Black shale, nine inches; Cannel coal, ten inches; Fire-clay, thickness not given.

An analysis of the Flint ridge cannel coal giyes, approximately, in round numbers, twenty per cent. of ash, thirty-seven per cent. of voltatile matter, and forty-three per cent. of fixed car- President Orton, of the Ohio State University, pronounces it the best cannel coal in Ohio (as can be seen by rehreaea

"'Any one traversing this ridge for the first time would be surprised to find such a deposit on such a geological horizon. It simulates very accurately the broken-up dedr's of a vertical dike, the gragment often covered with perfect crystals: of quartz, the rock itself being highly crystaline and often translucent. It is something of a puzzle to understand how such a deposit is found in a series of undisturbed and unmodified rocks: The adjacent surfaces of two blocks of the chert are often found covered with the quartz crystals of considerable size, as thoroughly interlocking with each other as if one were a cast and the othera matrix. I cannot imagine the conditions which would spread such a deposit over the floor of a sea or any other body of water. A substitution of silicious matter deposited from solution, in the place of a soluble limestone previously deposited, is the only plausible explanation. This substitution has taken place over large areas in this part of the State, and has left these silicious deposits only upon the horizons of the different limestones.

**Coal No. 1 is, in several localities in the county, of sufficient thickness to be mined for local consumption. In some places it rests upon a thin bed of carboniferous conglomerate, in others upon the olive shales of the Waverly; a bed of fire-clay and a thin stratum of shale being sometimes interposed between it and these rocks.

"In Madison township, about two miles southeast of Newark, about two hundred tons of this coal have been taken from Dr. Wilson's mine. The coal, as far as worked, was of fine quality, and reached a thickness of thirty inches. Near this point, a shaft sunk through the coal disclosed the including strata as follows:

* 'On this hill che limestone of the cannel coal is, by barometer, one hundred feet above coal No.1. On the southeast quarter of section one, Hopewell township, entries have been carried into the coal where it is reported to be from eighteen to twenty inches thick. On Lewis Baker's land, Mary Ann township, it is found near the top of the hill, and, when opened, ranges in thickness from one and a half to two feet. The Conglomerate here appears in a bed a few feet below it.

"On Wesley Painter's land, in the west part of Fallsbury township, coal No. x has about the same thickness, and the including strata, are as follows:

"At an opening on Jacob Priest's land, in Fallsbury township, this coal is from two and a half to three feet thick, in two benches; is bright and hard; a very good coal; but containing

**Citizens report that coal has been found on Alligator hill, a little east of Granville. Several excavations have been made into the hill, and one near the top. All expose shaly sandstone, which can be clearly identified as Waverly, and the debris of the Waverly is strewn over the surface of the highest part. I think no coal can be found in the hills, in this part of the county. It is true that in several places on the western margin of our coal-fields coal is found, in one sense, below the Upper Waverly. It is found, topographically, beiow.it, noi geologically, in valleys, on the slopes of the Waverly hills, which, in this neighborhood, rose above the old coal-marshes, and marked the original western limit of the coal-fields. My observations in this county, and northward, along the margin of the coal-field, render it very certain that the supposition sometimes made, that the Ohio coals were once continued westward over the Devonian and Silurian rocks to the Indiana and IIlinois field, and that they have since been carried away by erosion, is untenable."

""There is a directing and compensating Providence in nature. That which was denied to eastern Licking county by the benefits of the drift, was presented to it by the sweeping waste of waters. Stores of minerals laid up in prior periods were undisturbed and kept for the use of civilized man. Ohio geologists have conceded to this but a little corner of Bowling Green and Hopewell townships as included within the great Alleghany coal-field. Yet there are small lenticular masses of coal, some in workable beds, in Madison, Franklin, Bowling Green, Hopewell, Hanover, Mary Ann, Perry and Fallsbury townships. These small, isolated coal-fields present an instructive lesson, for though remote frém each other, the quality is so similar, that it may, with a single exception, be called identical in kind and quality.

"That exception is the cannel coal of the flint ridge; all other beds afford that variety called by miners cherry coal. It is dry, burns without much flame, makes a hot fire, and is valuable fuel. The sameness of the coal in all the different beds, teaches that it was all produced under like conditions. This is shown, too, by the fossil plants associated with it in its several deposits. The cannel coal of Flint ridge is limited to a small district, perhaps not more than three hundred acres, is'a workable bed, valuable for gas, oil or fuel. The working of this bed shows that active energies have operated here since the formation of coal. The fossil shells, especially the lingula, with other mollusks of the same age, indicate that it is an ancient deposit. The Flint ridge itself, being composed of silica in a greater or less crystaline state, enclosing, in many instances, fossil shells, indicate that heat, and perhaps hot water, impregnated with silica, has been active there, with a force sufficient to upheave it to its present level.

"The Hopewell coal, in the neighborhood of Gratiot, is of true bituminous variety. 'This is a deep stratum, and one of the best coal mines in the State.

"Although the early settlers were fully aware of these coal deposits, they, from force of circumstances, did not for some years, give much attention to them. The clearing of the land furnished an abundance of fuel, and hence they did not need more appreciated, and its extent more fully developed. Wherever coal is found, iron is associated with it. The Mary Ann furnace, in operation some thirty-five years, produced thousands of tons of iron from the ores of the county. The Granville furnace was chiefly supplied with ores from the same coal region, and has produced several thousand tons of the metal."

The following extract from the address of Hon. Isaac Smucker, delivered at the Young Men's Christian Association rooms, January 2, 1880, regarding the formation, etc., of mineral coals, will be found interesting in this connection:

"Tt is one of the well established facts of geology and chemistry that all mineral coals are of vegetable origin, hence botany is enlisted to elucidate phenomena relating to them. They are composed of the strange, gigantic flora or herbaria of the past, the far past carboniferous epoch, innumerable specimens of which have been so faithfully preserved in our coal-beds. Geologists teach us that the different strata or layers of coal were, each one, originally deposited at or upon the surface, and that deposits were repeated at intervals, of variable distances or periods of time apart, being separated by parallel layers of sandstone, shales, limestone and other rock formations, ranging in thickness from a foot or two to an hundred feet, and sometimes more, the deposit or production of which, between the various strata or beds of coal must have required the lapse of many thousands of years, perhaps in most cases many times tens of thousands of years. The numerous deposits of coal, and the intervening layers of stones of different kinds are credited mainly to the indefinitely long geological period known as the carboniferous. 1 say mainly but. not wholly, for [ think jt can be demonstrated that the process of coal production, or at least of the inferior kinds, such as- peat and lignite is now going on in lagoons, marshes and bogs, and probably has been going on ever since the termination, of the carboniferous or great coal age.

"That our coals, in all their varieties, embracing peat, lignite, brown coal, bituminous, cannel, anthracite coal, also coke, plumbago, or graphite, are of vegetable origin, seems to be a generally admitted fact, and if further proof were needed, it could be found by closely observing certain natural processes now going on; for in nature, coal, or at least peat and lignite, can be seen in various stages of formation where vegetable tissue is heaped up and accumulated in bogs. On digging deep down into these bogs where the woody matter is surrounded by

'moisture and other favorable condidions for gradual decomposition, it is ascertained that the slow process of transforming said woody material into the combustible called peat is going on. And when peat becomes hardened by the lapse of ages, by diminished moisture, by evaporation, through the action of the elements, and otherwise changed by other causes, it becomes lignite. It is known that in the oldest peat bogs in Europe, at or near their bottom, a thin stratum of coal is generally found, and that there is reason to believe that the entire material composing those bogs, if undisturbed, would ultimately, under a combination of favorable' circumstances develop into coal-beds, the afore-named stratum at or near the bottom of the bogs, being the incipient formation thereof. Those favorable circumstances are, in paft, the continued full growth, for an indefinitely long period, of aquatic vegetation, the dedris of which would ultimately, by depression or sinking of the locality, and by water action, or by any other cause that resulted in inundation, which would by its sedimentary accumulations, form a covering for those beds of vegetable deposits. Most of those sedimentary accumulations 'are sand, pebbles, gravel, clay, mud, and other earthy matter. Where the sedimentary deposit is sand, and all favorable circumstances are present and continued in active operation for long ages, the present product yould be a bed of sandstone; when, by reason of a strong current, pebbles were carried along with the sand and intermingled with it, the result would bea conglomerate sandstone, such as is found at the mouth of the Rocky fork, and all along through the 'Licking narrows," where earthy matter, gravel and clay are the deposit, the products are, of course, different; and where the deposit consists of a combination of any or all of those materiels, there is no difficulty in arriving at a correct knowledge of the facts in the case; and finally, when the sedimentary deposit is what is popularly called a kind of a clayey mud, if the requisite constituent elements are present, such as silex, alumina, oxide and sulphate of iron, potash, magnesia and carbon, the product will ultimately be shale or argillaceous slates. These shale and slate deposits are often found in layers immediately above and below coal-beds, and generally contain more or less of carbonaceous matter, and possibly other constituent elements of mineral coal, in limited quantities. The amount of carbon they contain is so small as to preclude their use as fuel, although they are, in a sense, combustible, and by heat can be reduced to their original elements. This may be chiefly because they have been so long in proximity to the coal deposits, where they were placed by the action of water, and solidified in pursuance of the operation of nature's laws.

''Water action, let it be borne in mind, is an important agency, indeed an essential instrumentality in coal production, and I might add also in most other productions, as well as in giving shape and form to the surface of our globe, for it has assuredly been instrumental in floating into position the materials of which the earth is composed. The processes of coal formation, and the production of numerous other inanimate things of this world, are in active operation now, as they have been through the almost interminable geological ages of the past, and will so continue through the long cycles of the coming future. Indeed the process of creation itself is, in an important sense, a continuity - thus far it has been a progressive work, is still going on, and may go on unceasingly. A day with the Lord, the Bible informs us, is as a thousand years, anda thousand years as one day, that is, as one day of creation, by which is meant simply an indefinitely long geological day, age or period, as Hugh Miller, the author of ''The Old Red Sandstone," also of '' The Fgot-prints of the Creator," and of ''The Testimony of the Rocks," has maintained, making the six days of creation in Genesis to stand for six indefinitely long geological days or periods. In these views of the biblical bearings of geology he has the concurrence of Professors Silliman and Hitchcock and many other Christian scientists.

'Cuvier, the great naturalist, taught that the earth had been inhabited by a succession of different series of animals that ultimately became extinct, and that those of each period were peculiar to the age in which they lived. And the same is true also of aquatic and marine animals. The extinction, from natural causes, of the huge animals that once existed in the Ohio valley, as their remains will show, such as the mastodon, the megatherium and the mammoth, and their substitution by others better adapted to existing atmospheric, climatic and

_ And the same is true of other animals, also of reptilian monsters now extinct, and of birds and insects, whose places have been taken by others.

"The main or essential factors in coal production, during the carboniferous period, were: first, an atmosphere charged wlth carbon as to preclude the possibility istence of warm-blooded animals; second, a huge growth of "aquatic vegetation; third, heat; fourth, water action; fifth, moisture; sixth, decomposition; seventh, weight or pressure; ~ eighth, a favorable climate; ninth, time. And when and where all the foregoing conditions and elements are present and in active operation, the elements being in proper proportions and combinations, and the climate is favorable for coal production, then, of course, the resnlt will be coal. Chemists have, by chemical combinations and processes, manufactured coal, and therefore _ know all about its constituent elements, but the chemist with his retort charged with materials for manufacturing coal is at a disadvantage in competition with the production of nature's laboratory. Of course the formation of coal, or rather of peat and lignite, is now a much slower process than it was during the ages of more luxuriant vegetable growths, and when carbon was so _ redundant as to render warm. blooded life impossible. " *Tn Holland, Denmark and Sweden,' says Lesquereux, 'the thick deposits of peat are separated into distinct beds by strata of sand and mud, giving the best possible elucidation of the process of stratification of the coal measures.' 'For their formation,' says Maury, 'these bogs require a basin rendered impermeable by a substratum of clay and an active growth of ' aquatic or semi-zrial plants, having their roots in water, while their branches and leaves expand on the surface thereof, or rise in the air above it, constantly growing in the same place, whose debris, falling year after year, is heaped up and preserved "against atmospheric decomposition by stagnant water or great humidity in the air." It was during the carboniferous epoch, the geological age of gigantic vegetable growths, when our -pfincipal and most valuable beds of coal were deposited; and then it was when all the most favorable circumstances for the production of coal were in their highest development; when, in "fact, the conditions which tended most to promote the rapid formation of coal, in the different varieties, were all present and in active operation. ''During the carboniferous age of the earth's history, water covered very much more of its area than it does now, and portions of the continents were so little raised above its surface that a slight elevation or depression would change the lagoons, - marshes and bogs into dry land, or sink them below the surface of thesea. When air passes over, or rests on oceans, lakes or rivers, it becomes laden with vapor, whose influence is very potent, as the power of vapor to absorb and retain is very many times greater than that of air; hence as water then preponderated so largely over land, the atmosphere was heavily charged - with moisture, which, as well as heat, was essential in a coal- _ producing climate. In fact the absence of annual rings or | concentric circles, in carboniferous plants, found as fossils in our coal-beds, proves that there was no winter when and where our coal was produced; and as the same kind of coal-plants grew at the same time in Europe and America, as geologists have demonstrated, the same climate, substantially, must then _ have prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic. During the car- _ poniferous epoch the atmosphere was so largely charged with

"arly in the carboniferous age the coal-plants were doubtless of comparatively limited size, whose leaves floated on the surface of shallow marshes or lagoons, Gradually those aquatic plants grew larger and larger, the existing and steadily augmenting conditions for their better development being present, they naturally took root in increasing quantities and strength in those lagoons or marshes whose surfaces were partially covered with water, adding the growth of each year, slowly and silently, to the accumulating mass. As the age advanced these plants attained to a larger and still larger size, whose immense leaves and spreading branches would ultimately die and sink to the bottom, and thus form a bed for succteding vegetable growths of such proportions and in such quantities as to throw into insignificance anything of the same species in our day! This process, repeated for an indefinitely long period, finally resulted in producing peat, lignite, coal of varions kinds, coke and plumbago. The horse-tail flag, fossilized in coal-beds, has been found fourteen inches in diameter, while now it seldom reaches a thickness of one inch. Club-mosses, even within the tropics, are now of small size, while in coal formation, petrified, they have been found as thick as a man's body and fifty feet or more in length. Our ferns are of diminutive, dwarfish size, but in carboniferous times they reached the height of more than fifty feet. 'Other coal-plants,"' says Maury, 'grew to the same wonderful proportions, and as they fell others sprang up, and thus the 'heaping' process continued until nature caused some subsidence of the ground, the water closed over it all, and the currents deposited mud or sand; if the former a layer of slate was the ultimate result; if the latter a stratum of sandstone would be formed; and if pebbles were intermingled with the sand, the result would be a layer of conglomerate sandstone, such as we have in great abundance aiong the banks of the Rocky fork and in the 'Licking narrows,' which, it is plain to be seen, was formed exactly as here suggested.' After this subsidence, and the inundation ceased, the water having formed another bed or channel, fresh growths sprang up and a new deposit was formed, to sink and be covered up in turn; and as often as these periods of rest and submergence were repeated, so often would a new bed of coal come into existence, and in this oft-repeated process is found the simple, rationalexplanation why the coal measures generally consist of more than one seam or stratum; or in other words why there happen to be intervening or alternate sedimentary strata between the beds or layers of coal, the lower one of these coal strata, and its sedimentary covering, being, in many instances, found to be more than a thousand feet below the surface of the earth. This is undoubtedly more generally the known state of facts in Great Britain, where shaft-mining is the common method, than in the United States, where out-croping beds of coal are mainly utilized, and which in a sense is known as surface-mining. 'The thickness of those sedimentary deposits between the coal strata (sometimes a hundred feet or more), furnishes some idea of the immense duration of the uncounted ages or cycles of time that passed by, during the process of their formation. 'To accomplish a single revolution of the precession of the equinoxes, or what is known as a movement of the equinoctial points from east to west, requires but little less then twenty-five thousand years, and we are told by geologists that very "many of those revolutions were recorded on nature's pages, during the progress of the accumulations of the sedimentary substances which formed but a single one of the lay- Ens) deep down in the earth, resting upon the surface of a coalbed below it, and under another above it.

" After the vegeteble deposits which formed coal-beds were covered up, Maury says, 'a gradual decomposition took place, which consisted in an evolution of a portion of the carbon, and most of the hydrogen and oxygen, in the form of water and gasses from the woody tissue, leaving a larger and Jarger percentage of the carbon of the plant behind, while the increased pressure of the accumulating strata above, served to compress and solidify the mass,' which before had been in a state of fusion, probably of about the consistence of tar in a mild climate.

"But before this solidification took place, as Liebig has proved by direct experiment, in the process of slow decomposition of vegetable matter in water, a softening had occurred, and it is to this that we must ascribe the fact that no delicate fossils are ever found in the coal itself, as the tissue and form were destroyed by the softening and subsequent pressure, though cases are met with where solid trunks of trees have resisted this softening process, and are found standing erect in the seams while their roots are plainly traced in the clay slates below. In the shales and slates above and below, which it will be remembered, were originally soft, plastic mud, naturally, therefore, the plant impressions therein are as sharp and clear as though they had been sketched with an artist's pencil."

"From the foregoing it will be seen that I have been dealing with a solved problem, a problem that scientists have often solved by the methods of the laboratory - -by the microscope - by critical investigation--by close examination - by careful observation and philosophical reasoning - -by scientific and logical deduction - by intelligent experiment - by accurate inspection - by established data as to causes and their effects - by the concurrent belief and testimony of nearly all the eminent geologists of Europe and America, who haye written upon the subject, and who are supported substantially by most of the learned professors of science in the principal colleges and universities of both the eastern and western continents, and no less by oft-repeated and unmistakable démonstration itself.

"'T have expressed the belief in this paper that the process of peat, lignite and perhaps coal production is now going on, as it has been going on through the slow-moving and well-nigh unending geological ages of the past, and probably will continue to go on through all future time! And TI will take this occasion to express the belief that there is now in process of formation a bed of peat, within the limits of Newark. The location of this bed of peat is between the North Fork feeder and the North Fork creek. If Locust street were extended due east over the feeder to the creek, it would pass near it.

"Again, I think peat could be found in the swamp between the Central railroad and the Cherry Valley road, a mile or more west of Newark. That swamp was largely a dry prairie, serving the purposes of a race-track until the earthquakes in the Mississippi valley, in 181z-rz, when, by depression, it was transformed into a pond, and remained such until it was partially drained, some thirty yearsago. The belief is not an unreasonable one that peat has been in process of formation there during many of the ages of the past, and that that process Is still going on, and will certainly not cease as long as the conditions for the production of that material remain favorable.

'And there is but little doubt that the Cranberry marshes | in the vicinity of the reservoir and also the Bloody Run swamps, near Kirkersville, are peat-bearing loealities. And finally, I refer to another locality within the limits of Licking county, where the surface or external appearances are equally ~ promising indications of the existence and progressive growth of peat: I mean the Cranberry marsh, in early times called "'Warthan's Prairie," and later, '' Wilson's Prairie,'' situated a few miles southeast of Utica. And what is true of the abovenamed localities is doubtless as true of many points of similar external appearance and surroundings, found to a greater or less extent in every section of our country."

"The paleontology of the Flint ridge is as yet comparatively but little known. The earlier-time records of that locality were _ ineffaceably engraved there in fossil characters - its primeval history was written deep down in the earth by God and nature, in the unerring language of petrifaction; its old-time annals were indelibly inscribed in the unmistakable nomenclature of geology; upon its extensive beds of minerals, stones and rocks, its organic remains, imbeded in the limestone formations far down beneath the surface, tell us of the great past, when this ridge was in its primeval condition, long ages before man existed or could exist upon it; its vegetation in petrifaction, imprinted with nature's graver, upon its coal and other deposits, tells us in the more than exactness and certainty of scientific language of the long geological ages and carboniferous epochs, now long gone by, when another and more luxuriant vegetation, one much more charged with carbon, grew and flourished there, and when marine organisms also were redundant there as well as in contiguous land and water localities, which, largely by water action, contributed the now fossilized vegetable and organic remains found in the coal, limestone and other mineral formations of the Flint ridge.

"But although the lexicon of paleontology is given to us in petrified or stone characters, letters and words, and jn well marked fossilized vegetation, such as plants and shrubs and trees, also of distinct and almost living organic forms that were once animate with life, engraved by nature upon our long buried sedimentary stones and rocks and other mineral deposits; nevertheless the careful and persevering student of the alphabet in which that lexicon was written, soon learns to read, translate, interpret and understand it as if it were a matter settled as with the unerring certainty of demonstrated science itself. All this can be done, has been done, and is being constantly done by those who have untiringly and zealously devoted the requisite amount of time, labor and talents to its accomplishment.

'By the study of organic remains,' said the late Col. Foster, 'it has been discovered that each of the sedimentary deposits has its characteristic fossils. By this means we can determine the epochs of the different formations, identify the same formation at remote points, and throughout all its lithological changes, and ever. calculate with some degree of certainty the periods when the present mountain chains were lifted up. These fossils, che continues, 'indicate a progressive development of organic life from the coral, closely allied to the vege- table, up to man, the head of created beings. From them also _ we learn the various revolutions which the earth has undergone, the changes in the temperature of its surface, and the animals _ which peopled it in periods far remote.' _ 'The author of the foregoing paragraph (the late Colonel _ Foster), when a member of the Ohio corps of geologists, in 1837, explored Flint ridge, in the interest of paleontology, and reported that he found fossilized organic remains there in great ' perfection and beauty. _ frequent occurrence : " "First - Terebratula, that is, a genus of bivalve mollusks of _the class Brachiopodx, in which one of the valves is perforated for the transmission of a sort of tendinous ligament, by which _the animal fixes itself to submarine animals. This order of "molluscous animals is also characterized by two fleshy arms or labial processes, which they can protrude or withdraw, and which serve for prehension.

"* Second - Encrini, afossil belonging to the asteria or star-fish family, consisting of numerous pointed arms radiating from -around a centre in which the mouth is situ&ted, and is supported on a jointed stem, therein differing from all the recent _asterias. | " Third - Anthophylla, described by Colonel Foster asa min- 'eral of the horn-blende family, occurring in brittle fibres, or fibrous or bladed masses (primarily flower and leaf,) of differ- 'ent shades of dark brown, and with a semi-metallic lustre. It consists chiefly of silica, magnesia and oxyd of iron, and is found abundantly in some varieties of prifnary rocks.

'' Fourth - Spirifera, known as an extinct genus of mollusks, "having a shell with two internal calcareous spiral appendages. _ "Fifth - Infusoria, described by Dana as microscopic animals -nhabiting waters and liquids of various kinds, and having no organs of motion, except exceedingly minute hairs. | '' Sixth - Trilobites, an extinct family of crustacea, found in the earliest fossiliferous strata, Colonel Foster reported, were 'also found in a limestone on the ridge, and remarked that its occurrence (it being a fossil not observed, generally, in the coal measures), indicated that it flourished there after it had ceased to exist in other countries. ~ " Seventh - Lingula, which belongs to the grass family of fos- 'sils, with flat leaves, not including the stem or the sheath of the One author speaks of some specimens of this class of

" Eighth - Producta, which is an extinct genus, says a late author, of bivalve shells closely allied to the living genus Terebratula (described as the first of this list), and which the writer 'says are found only in the older secondary rocks.

«Professor E. B. Andrews, who, as one of the geological corps of Ohio, explored Flint ridge in 1869, gives us some information in regard to the palentology of that locality. He says that the basins or depressions which contain the cannel coal were filled with water while the process of coal formation was going on, which is proved by the abundant presence of the marine shell Linguda. We also-obtained a specimen of Stigmaria, made up of coal itself, which still retained its cylindrical form. It is a fossil coal plant, says Buckland, having a large domeshaped stem or trunk. Both were found by Professor Andrews most abundant in the lower part of the coal. In the lower coal measures of Flint ridge he also found a specimen of Synocladia or Biserialis, that is, a double-rowed class of fossils, notched on the edge like a saw, ora serrate leaf, pointing to the extremity, some of them having the serratures toothed. It grows in very rapidly, spreading, funnel-shaped form, the stems seeming to radiate from the same point, and throwing off on each side lateral branches, which also give off, in the same way, lateral branchlets.

'* Professor Andrews also found specimens of the Péélodictya, or bifurcated ramose, the bifurcations occurring usually at rather distant intervals. They were branched as a stem or root. having lateral divisions, poriferous surfaces, six to eight longitudinal rows, separated by spaces of double the diameter of the spores."

Professor Andrews also found shells of the genus Placunopsis, which were slightly oblique, with léngths and breadths nearly equal, cardinal margin nearly straight, not quite equaling the greatest breadth of the valves, beak small, depressed, and but slightly projecting beyond the cardinal margin, near the middle of which it is placed, with scarcely perceptible obliquity.

Another shell was found in the dark shales of the Flint ridge coal measures, described by Professor Andrews as obliquely subovate, compressed, very thin, posterior basal margin regularly rounded, and surface marked by regular concentric unduations, with intermediate parallel striae.

And still another shell was found on the ridge, which was described as of large size, of smooth surface, or showing only obscure lines of growth. A full description of most of the foregoing, found by Professor Andrews, is given in volume two, Ohio Paleonthology, pages 326-37.

Professor Andrews also reported a bed of dark blue fossiliferous limestone, ranging in thickness from twelve to fourteen feet, situated four feet nine inches above the cannel coal at the mine, and separated from it by a deposit of blue clay slate of four inches of bituminous coal, anda stratum of five inches of bituminous slate. 'This limestone he found abounding in fossils, and he states that he utilized them so far as to make a handsome collection, but he did not furnish a detailed description of them. 'The shales and limestone of Flint ridge were found by Professor Andrews to have identically similar fossils. Further explorations would doubtless richly reward, with abundant success, the palenthologists' labors on the ridge.