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( 283 ) 



No. XLVI. 



An account of the Freestone quarries on the Potomac and Rap- 

 pahannoc rivers, by B. H. Latrobe. 



Read February 10th, 1807. 



ON the 19th of December, 1798, I presented to the 

 American Philosophical Society, a memoir on the sand hills 

 of Virginia, which the Society did me the honor to publish 

 in the fourth volume of their Transactions, page 439. — It was 

 my intention then, to have offered to the Society, a series of 

 geological papers, the materials of which I had collected, and 

 of which this memoir was the first. But my intention was 

 delayed and partly defeated by the loss of a very large collec- 

 tion of all the principal fossils, necessary to elucidate my ob- 

 servations, in their passage by water, from Fredericksburg to 

 Philadelphia. — This collection, intended for the American Phi- 

 losophical Society, was made by the industry of my excellent 

 friends, Mr. William Maclure now at Paris, of the late Dr. 

 Scandella whose untimely death in 1798 science and friend- 

 ship equally have to deplore, and of myself. — It consisted of 

 specimens of loose and undecayed fossil shells, found on and 

 near the surface, from the coast to the falls of the rivers of Vir- 

 ginia, of the shell rocks of York river, of the clays with im- 

 pressions of shells in every fracture, but which shew no re- 

 maining evidence of any calcareous matter when subjected 

 to chemical tests; of the exuviae of sea animals*, bones of fish- 

 es, sharks' teeth, marsh mud, fossil wood and coral rock, dug 

 from the deep wells about Richmond, of the marlcs of Pa- 

 munky and Mattapony, of all the strata of the coal mines on 

 James's river, of the varieties of the granite of Virginia, of 

 the free stone of James's river and the Rappahannoc, 

 with the vegetable petrefactions and coal belonging to it; and 

 of a variety of miscellaneous fossils. — My object in recitim* 



* Drawings of some of the exuviae accompanied my memoir, to which refer. The 



bones of the fool there represented, are probably those of a sea tortoise. Vide Vol. IV. p. 444. 



