144 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



considerable water; going southward it disappears under the surface, 

 and the quicksand found at Champaign eightv feet below the surface is 

 probably the same bed. 



Large quantities of limestone in the surface soil of parts of Living- 

 ston and La Salle counties, by their lithological character and occasional 

 pines and fossils are traced to the Niagara rocks in the adjacent coun- 

 ties to the north, as the place of their departure, and that they have not 

 traveled froin further shows by the fact that they are to a large extent 

 quite angular andnot much worn by attrition. Farther north they di- 

 minish in quantity and finally disappear. The surface soil will be free, 

 for long distances, of any local rocks until some new point of departure 

 is passed, when occurs a like repetition of the southward movement of 

 the neighboring rocks from some one of the axes before described. 



In portions of Southern Illinois, spots of whitish clay, bare of veg- 

 etation, are found ; sometimes a thin covering of soil is over them. 

 An examination of this shows it to be a subsoil of wide extent, inasmuch 

 as it can be traced from the vicinity of Neoga, on the Illinois Central 

 railroad as far south as Dongola. In the southern hill portion of Illi- 

 nois it is the first stratum immediately overlaying the rocks and has 

 fifteen to twenty feet of soil over it. In portions of the prairie further 

 north where not bare it has so little covering of good soil as to seriously 

 affect success in horticultural labors. 



The indications are that in the final drainage of the drift period, 

 these places were exposed by considerable currents of water washing 

 away the clay which seems to have been quite evenly distributed, and 

 which forms the now fertile soil above this stratum. After passing Big 

 ]Muddy river in a southerly direction the country ascends rapidly until 

 at South Pass ridge an elevation is attained of about six hundred feet 

 above the Mississippi river at Cairo, while Big Muddy, near Carbondale 

 is only sixty^feet above same datum, and the river banks seldom more 

 than twenty feet above low water, with the adjacent country,! think, not 

 more than a hundred feet above the stream. 



A careful examination shows that the very broken character of the 

 country for forty miles south of Big Muddy, or from Carbondale to 

 Dongola, was formed, or fixed, prior to the dejoosition of the soil over 

 it. The most conclusive evidence of this is the presence of the whitish 

 day referred to, and the identical stratum following the undulations of 

 the country, and the generally even deposit of the heavy body of soil 

 over it, remaining not much disturbed on the hills, but generally washed 

 out in the bottoms of the valleys. 



The only difference between the soil of these hills and that of the 

 prairie appears to be the greater fineness of that on the hills, as though it 

 had been more levigated. 



From the general survey thus given it will be apparent that while 

 ' there may be a general resemblance, there must be much local differ- 

 ence in the soils of the prairie in their original composition. Added to 

 this is the fact that the little elevations of the prairie have been slowly 



