PREFACE. 
Grotoey, Mineralogy and Chemistry, have been long recognized in their relation to Mining, Metallurgy, and 
some other of the useful arts, but it is comparatively of recent date that these sciences have been applied, 
‘systematically and extensively, to the advancement of agriculture and the arts of civilization. 
Men there were, it is true, who cultivated thdse sciences, and whose labors were published for the public 
good—the journals and transactions of associations for the promotion of science, have furnished those, to 
whom they were accessable, a vast amount of information applicable to the common affairs of life. But little 
more than twenty years have elapsed since the first attempt was made by any Government to cause a syste- 
matic Geological Survey to be made by competent persons, for the purpose of collecting into a body, for the 
express use of the people, a correct knowledge of the facts derived from science, in relation to the resources of 
the territory which they inhabit. North Carolina* has the merit of having commenced the work; and, in 
1826, a Report upon the Geological and Mineralogical Survey of South Carolina, made by order of the Legis- 
lature, was presented by Mr. Lardner Vanuxem. Since that time, the example of these States has been 
followed by nearly all the others, so that we have now embodied, in a series of reports, a mass of information 
on the Geology and industorial resources of the United States, as gratifying to the friends of science as it is 
useful to the people at large. 
The Survey, of which the result is contained in the following pages, is due to a movement altogether agricul- 
tural. A survey of the State had been long and ably advocated by the late R. W. Roper, Esq. Chairman of 
the Committee on Agriculture; and, in 1842, an Agricultural Survey of the State was ordered by the Legis- 
lature, and Edmund Ruffin, Esq. of Virginia, whose name and writings are identified with the agriculture of 
the country, was called to conduct the survey, by Gov. Hammond. After a year of arduous labor, in the 
development of the agricultural resources of the State, the result of which is found in his excellent report, 
Mr. Ruffin resigned, and I had the honor of receiving a commission from Goy. Hammond, to sueceed him in 
conducting the survey. 
‘Tt is difficult, if not impossible, to separate an Agricultural from a Geological Survey—for the science of 
Agriculture is a combination of all the natural sciences, and whoever examines Mr. Ruffin’s Agricultural perpen, 
+I stated i in my first annual Report, on the authority of Mr. Vanuxem’ s report, that South Carolina made the first move~ 
ment. This, I have since learned, was a mistake. 
