]865.] 33 [Lesley. 



Mr. Lesley took occasion, in presenting this communica- 

 tion of Mr. Sheafer, to describe the method of the existence 

 of the petroleum in the eastern coal-field of Kentucky, which 

 he had lately visited. 



The whole surface of that part of the State of Kentucky, 

 watered by Paint Lick Creek and its tributaries, is a mass 

 of hogback ridges, sharp conical hilltops, and profound rock 

 gorges with steep or vertical walls, bordered by a broken 

 highland of coal measures. The highest hilltops of which 

 are about 700 feet above the beds of the deepest gorges, or 

 canons. 



The wildest and most beautiful scenery meets the eye at 

 every turn ; long walls of rock, with their edges against the 

 sky ; extraordinary piles of pulpit-rocks, standing isolated at 

 the junction of two streams ; overhanging tablets of sand- 

 stone, two hundred feet long, and thirty feet thick, project- 

 ing twenty feet beyond their supporting cliffs, and a hundred 

 and fifty feet above the spectator's head; dark forest gorges, 

 heading up in caves, over the roofs of which fall high cas- 

 cades ; and in the decomposable faces of the cliffs, bear-dens, 

 and robber-caverns, and pit-holes of all sizes, sometimes so 

 numerous as to give the traveller the impression that he might 

 make out old inscriptions, with a genuine meaning in them, if 

 he tried. 



From the disintegration of this world of friable sandrock, 

 from the slow cutting of the waters of all the forks of Paint, 

 down through from 200 to 250 feet of such strata, in the 

 lapse of geological ages, have come the incredible quantities 

 of loose, yellowish sea-sand, which form the terraced banks 

 of the Sandy River, fill up its valley-bed, and give to it its 

 name. 



There are other similar sandrocks,* running horizontally 



* On Low Devil Creek, a head of Eed Kiver, at the 236th mile of the 

 Base Line Survey, and therefore 50 miles west of Paintsville, the Tio- 

 nista (Freeport?) Sandstone lies 80 feet ahove the Conglomerate, and 

 is well filled with plant impressions, and has thin coal-seams wedged in 

 between its layers. S. S. Lyon, IV, p. 532. 



