Lesley.] 4^4 [December. 



exhibiting to the members present. The rings of growth, the rays, 

 and the bark fibre, are as visible as in a fresh butt. The wood is 

 converted partly into a brilliant cannel coal, and the rest of it into 

 common brown coal. No leaves or fruit have as yet been noticed by 

 the workmen ; although such may have been overlooked, from want 

 of knowledge of their importance. 



It is possible that a large body of this material may exist just 

 where the shaft happened to be sunk; for the Brandon deposit is a 

 mass about 25 (twenty-five) feet square, descending steeply through 

 a hundred fold larger mass of white clay, to a depth of at least 100 

 (one hundred) feet. But we cannot call it a large body comparatively 

 speaking. It is scarcely larger than the trunk of a single one of the 

 wiant trees of California ; a mere plug of coal thrust vertically down- 

 ward into a mass of clay. But Prof. Hitchcock expresses the opinion 

 that the Brandon deposit is not " a vertical plug," but a fragment of 

 a regularly steep-dipping stratum of lignite. He dissents expressly 

 from my own view of the case (published in 1857, after I had visited 

 the locality), when he says : " Mr. Lesley imagines that the Brandon 

 deposit is in a hole, like that in Balamacadam, in Ireland. But if 

 he will visit the former, he will find it no more and perhaps rather less 

 in a hole than the other analogous deposits scattered for two hundred 

 miles along the west base of the Green Mountain range. They gene- 

 rally occur in depressions in the limestone floor, or in sheltered valleys, 

 and this is probably why the drift agency did not sweep them away."* 



The venerable and candid geologist whose loss we have been called 

 upon so recently and so heartily to deplore, would have taken, per- 

 haps, more delight in the discovery near Chambersburg, than any 

 other man living; and I regret with a very sad feeling the impossi- 

 bility of comparing notes with him once more upon this old ground of 

 dispute. For he would probably now be convinced that the diflFerent 

 facts involved in this phenomenon must be separated ; and that we 

 have to keep our eyes open to several collateral but independent 

 trains of geological accidents. The Lignite and the Iron-ore are 

 neither of the same age, nor, strictly speaking, possessed of any struc- 

 tural attribute common to both. I have, therefore, regarded only 

 the lignite deposit as "in a hole;" not by any means the iron ore. 

 This latter I have long ago described as continuously stratified. When 

 Dr. Hitchcock, therefore, in the above quotation from his report, 

 says, that I will find it no more and perhaps less in a hole than the 



* Geology of Vermont, 1861, page 238, lines 4-6. 



