1864.] 465 [Lesley. 



other analogous deposits, &c.," he cannot mean to affirm anything of 

 the lignite ; for there are no other analogous lignite deposits known, 

 except only the ore which I bring to the notice of the Society to- 

 night. And I expect to receive the evidence, that it also is truly 

 "in a hole;" that is, it will probably be found to be as curious an 

 exception to all the rest of the phenomena of the whole belt of hema- 

 tite deposits of the Great Valley, for many hundreds of miles in Penn- 

 sylvania and Virginia, as the little plug of lignite at Brandon is an 

 exception to all the other features not only of the great Brandon ore 

 bed, but of all that belt of similar ore beds which ranges for several 

 hundred miles through Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York. 



Geologists will appreciate the assertion that it is the extreme rari- 

 ty of these lignite apparitions in one of the most wonderfully con- 

 tinuous, extensive and valuable ore belts of the world, that gives them 

 all their importance, and produces all our embarrassment. It is 

 therefore of prime importance to make sure of this fact, viz., of the 

 actual rarity of the presence of lignite, or its equivalents, in the ore 

 deposits, and to keep this rarity always in mind, in discussing the 

 age of the ore belt itself; but this Dr. Hitchcock has not done. 



On pages 234-236 of the Vermont Report, he says : " Wherever 

 we have found brown hematite and manganese, or beds of ochre, or 

 pipe clay, white, yellow or red, in connection with coarse sand or 

 gravel, all lying beneath the drift, and resting on the rocks beneath, 

 we have regarded the deposit as an equivalent of that at Brandon 

 just described, even though not more than one or two of the sub- 

 stances named be present." The peculiar feature of the Brandon 

 mine is therefore ignored by being confused with others, common 

 to the whole belt. 



Dr. Hitchcock gives a list of 26 such deposits along the western 

 side of the Green Mountain range, premising that : " from Stam- 

 ford through Bennington, as far as Middlebury, it would probably 

 not exceed the truth to represent it as a continuous narrow belt. 

 North of Middlebury the localities are few, perhaps from denudation." 

 Yet along this "probably continuous" belt, he can enumerate, with 

 exception of the Brandon mine, only one, that of East Bennington, 

 which exhibits even so much analogy to a lignite deposit as " pipe 

 clay with numerous stems of plants;" and only six others, wherein 

 white clay, ochre, ochres and clay, or lithomarge, suggest to his mind 

 an analogy with the Brandon kaolin. 



Now it is quite as safe to call the continuation of the line of the 

 Vermont ore deposits, through Massachusetts, New York, New Jer- 



TOL. IX. — 3k 



