56 



industrial interest pf the state, six million dollars having 

 already been invested in lands and mining and manufac- 

 turing materials by northern capitalists alone. 



The relation of the phosphate beds to the Quaternary 

 formation of the state and of the latter to the glacial beds 

 of sand and clay of the northern states, were, however, 

 the principal points he would allude to. At a celebrated 

 locality of Quaternary fossils at Simmon's Bluff on Wad- 

 malaw Sound, about thirty miles by steam from Charles- 

 ton, he made with the kind and generous aid of Dr. 

 Shepard, Jr., a large collection of fossils, from a bed of 

 sand and mud about four feet in thickness. This bed 

 corresponded with the marine clays of New England and 

 Labrador, and the ancient sea bottom with its multitude of 

 shells, which remained just as they had died in their holes, 

 reminded him of an ancient raised sea-bottom at Hope- 

 dale, Labrador. 



These clay beds graduated into clay and sand, contain- 

 ing a ferruginous layer, supposed by Dr. Shepard, Jr., to 

 be the horizon of the phosphate beds. These beds cor- 

 respond to the beds of clay at Gardiner, Maine, where Sir 

 Charles Lycll discovered the bones of the Bison and 

 Walrus, and contains bones of the Megalonyx, Mastodon, 

 Elephant, Tapir, two species of Horse, Peccary, Rhi- 

 noceros and Manatee. The sands graduate into the beach 

 sands of the close of the Quaternary, just as do the Bison 

 and Walrus beds of the Kennebec river. The phosphate 

 beds, then, were probably rolled masses of Eocene rock 

 crowded with shells, mingled with the bones of the ani- 

 mals above mentioned, deposited and arranged by the 

 waves of a shallow sea a few feet deep. This sea was 

 much shallower even than that which covered the ancient 

 sea bottom beneath, which must have been only from one 

 to five or ten fathoms deep, as the same shells are at the 



