1866.] 233 [Lesley. 



oil well. Geologically speaking, it is, of course, an impossibility; 

 certainly an incredibility. The outcrops of the Mahoning Sandstone 

 along the Laurel Hill, Chestnut Ridge and Alleghany, Savage, Wills, 

 Broad Top and other mountains, extend in the aggregate to thousands 

 of miles ; and the common constitution of the rock is so well known 

 that none but an insane person would now look for a gold quartz pebble 

 in it anywhere, even a hundred miles nearer to the gold-bearing bolt 

 of the Atlantic seaboard, much less here in the heart of the bitumi- 

 nous coal area. Nothing but an iceberg from the gold region of 

 Eastern Canada could have deposited a collection of nuggets in 

 Greene County, Penna. But we know the Mahoning sandstone was 

 a shore deposit, filling in the bed of an exceedingly shallow and even- 

 bottomed sea like Lake Erie, but many times larger, which had just 

 before been created by the slow settling of the whole coal area a 

 few yards underwater-level ; as is shown by the immense extent and 

 regularity of the Upper Freeport Coalbed. In fact I think we must 

 rather regard this water area as a marshy rolling prairie country sub- 

 merged enough to receive about a hundred feet of sand and pebbles 

 mixed with mud, irregularly but universally dropped into it, by the 

 erosion of the tops of its own low hills or ridges, still standing out of 

 water; in fact an immense archipelago of very soft rocks through 

 which currents carried also material brought from afar. It even 

 looks as if the parallel anticlinal mountains of Westmoreland and 

 Fayette and Somerset Counties to the eastward were already raised 

 and suifering erosion ; and such was Dr. R. M. S. Jackson's opinion 

 when he studied this part of the State under the direction of Prof. 

 H. D. Rogers, chief of the State survey, in 1839. 



It is inconceivable therefore how pieces of gold-bearing quartz, iron 

 pyrites and galena, should find a resting-place among these submerged 

 hummocks of coal measures; much less be deposited in a stratum 

 three feet thick. Nor can we suppose a gold-bearing vein ascending 

 from the floor of Lower Silurian to withiu five hundred feet of the 

 surface of the top of the Middle or Barren Coal Measures; for such 

 a phenomenon is unheard of; and if such were by any chance to be 

 struck in one well, there would be thousands of millions to one against 

 the repetition of the accident within a radius of three miles. 



When we recall therefore the discovery of a quarter keg of ten 

 penny nails at the depth of six hundred feet in one of the wells on 

 Two Mile Run, Venango County, and the discovery of butter of 

 antimony in a well in Western Virginia, we may quietly wait until 



