20 Kansas Academy of science. 



these wells are closed, and some nearly closed, by the deposit of the minerals in solution, 

 of which silicon was among the chief — allowing us to trace the double action of water, 

 first in wearing out a channel, and then in closing it up. The fossils of this yellow chalk 

 are the same as in the blue shale, with the addition of the characteristic Ostrea congesta 

 and tbe gigantic Haploscapha grandis. 



No. 3. Is a greenish sand, which bleaches in weathering. We have found it in only 

 in two localities certainly, and in neither place do we see it on the chalk, but it is within 

 a few feet of where the chalk must be. We have found in it no fossils. 



No. 4- Is a green clay shale, with streaks and patches of yellow ; and in the outcrop 

 where we first found it, it has a black, carbonaceous line, persistent for several rods. This 

 green shale lies directly on the green sand in two out of three places where we observed 

 it ( both on the Prairie Dog) ; but in the other place, eighteen miles away, it lies directly 

 on the chalk. Possibly the green sand is a local premonition of the green shale. The 

 shale is about six feet thick. 



No. 5. Is the ruggedest rock of the county. It occurs in bold ledges and rough crags. 

 It is, however, very various. Prof. St. John refers to it as " irregularly bedded." This 

 is strictly accurate. Nowhere in all the county have we seen it so that it could be de- 

 scribed as stratified. Yet in escarpments of ten to twenty feet it gives several layers 

 decidedly harder than the other parts, and these weather out into hard ridges. Varying 

 much in character, it everywhere contains both sand and lime. We have called it the 

 calcareous grit. In some places the grit is so coarse that it becomes a conglomerate held 

 in a limey or clayey paste of various degrees of hardness; in others the sand is finer, 

 and the lime in such quantity that it will do for mortar, and sometimes it is native lime 

 with so little grit that it is used for plastering inside walls. It often contains limey or 

 chalky nodules of great hardness and very tough. Again, it hardens into a building 

 stone, and in other places its cliffs of sand have only lime enough to harden and whiten 

 the weathered surface ; and everywhere it contains cylindrical concretions, which Prof. 

 Cope thinks may have been roots. The thickness of this No. 5 is not less than 200 feet. 

 It comes down to within 30 or 40 feet of the level of the main streams, and in some 

 places it is at or near the top of the high prairie. The Twin Mounds, in the Solomon 

 valley, near Lenora, show a section of it for at least 150 feet to their very tops. A well 

 twenty miles north pierces it to a depth of 130 feet. The wild canons cut into it show 

 its thickness to the same extent. The various qualities of this formation make it weather 

 into bold and fantastic forms. In a wild ravine, southwest nine miles from Norton, it 

 has been cut and carved by sun and wind and water into such varieties of shape, that the 

 feeblest fancy may see turret ed castles, pinnacles of churches, archways, battlements and 

 towers. From one appearance as a cowled priest, we have named it, with the acceptance 

 of the citizens of the county, Monk's Canon. The most wonderful part of this formation is, 

 however, its fossil remains. It is a burying ground of mammals! Here are jaws of rhi- 

 noceros, teeth of horses, shells of enormous turtles, bones and tusks of mastodon. It is 

 the Loup Fork Miocene, the upper part of the Middle Tertiary. In 1878, Professor 

 Mudge suggested that this formation in Trego county was possibly Miocene. (First Bi- 

 ennial Agricultural Report, p. 55.) Four years earlier, Prof. E. D. Cope described it as 

 it occurs near the Colorado line, and without finding fossils, said it was probably Miocene 

 Tertiary, ( Cret. Vert., p. 19,) while at the same time he made a distinction between Mio- 

 cene and Loup Fork, (p. 13.) Now the doubt is all gone. Professor Cope pronounces 

 the jaw before us Aphelops from the Loup Fork Miocene. It will need further investi- 

 gation to decide whether Professor Cope's Ticholeptus and Procamelus beds are distinctly 

 marked in Kansas. One important feature remains to be noted: this Miocene is erosivdy 

 unconformable with the strata below it. The surface of the yellow chalk was worn away 

 to the extent of scores of feet, and left very rough by a long period of sub-aerial erosion. 



