Overland Arctic Eicpedition. 163 



here at the present tiiQe. I inclose this minute specimen, which 

 has already suffered some diminution in the course of my exa- 

 mination of it. Muriatic acid produced no change in it ; but I 

 was afraid to try the nitric acid, lest it should destroy it. 



" When put into the fire the lignite burns without flame, and 

 emits a very disagreeable stench, unlike that of either peat or 

 of sulphur. The combustion does not cease when the coal is 

 removed from the fire, but goes on slowly, until there is only 

 a brownish-red ash remaining, not one-tenth of the original bulk 

 of the specimen. 



" The beds of lignite lie on the east side of Bear Lake Ri- 

 ver, where it joins the Mackenzie, are in the aggregate six or 

 seven yards thick, and are covered by a thick bed of loose sand. 

 They were on fire when Sir A. Mackenzie discovered the river 

 (in 1789), and have continued burning ever since. At the dis- 

 tance of a few hundred yards up the Bear Lake River, there 

 are some thick beds of a coarse, bluish-grey, earthy looking sand- 

 stone (very like that on the north side of the Calton Hill), dip- 

 ping at a small angle under the lignite. They were not seen in 

 actual contact. On the opposite side of Bear Lake River, which 

 is 200 yards wide, a craggy hill of (carboniferous ?) limestone 

 rises abruptly to the elevation of 400 feet. About 30 miles far- 

 ther up Bear Lake River, and nearly east from its mouth, the 

 stream cuts the base of another limestone hill, of similar form 

 and height, belonging to a chain of (partly transition ?) hills, 

 which runs N.W. and S. E. through a flat country. At the 

 foot of the nearly vertical limestone, but separated from it by a 

 small rivulet, there are thick horizontal beds of sandstone, re- 

 sembling that at the mouth of Bear Lake River. Upon this 

 sandstone lie a number of thin beds of bituminous shale and 

 sandstone, which weather easily. In the shale there are im- 

 pressions of ferns (polypodiaceae), and in the slaty sandstone 

 lepidodendra ? I have had no opportunity of examining these 

 rocks, excepting very cursorily, as we passed them in the boat, 

 and occasionally snatched a specimen ; but I purpose, if the 

 snow disappeai's long enough before the opening of the naviga- 

 tion, to visit them carefully this spring. The finest sections on 

 the banks of the river will be hid by accumulations of ice till the 

 autumn.*' 



l2 



