230 Geological and Mineralogical Notices. 
Arr. II.—Geological and Mineralogical Notices ; by Otiver P. 
Hussarpv, M.:D. Professor of Chemistry, serena is and Geol- 
ogy, in Dartmouth College. 
TO PROFESSOR SILLIMAN. 
Dear Sir,—Enclosed are some observations, made two years 
since, during an excursion in the northern part of the State of New 
York, which are at your service, should you think them worthy of 
being -recorded. 
At Boonville, Oneida County, N. Y., the underlying rock of the 
country is the transition limestone, which has been heretofore de- 
scribed in its extent and outlines by Prof. Eaton, and I only wish to 
mention its appearance and character at this one point in the line of 
its direction from Trenton Falls to Lake Ontario. ‘The surface, 
when the soil is removed, is found smooth, as if worn by attrition, 
but which may be owing to an equable disintegration produced by 
causes in constant action. - Throughout the soil and on its surface 
are scattered large, thin, flat curvilinear masses of the same rock, 
which are also worn smooth. The rock is burned extensively for 
lime—is very hard, and a stratified in layers of moderate thick- 
ness, is easily quarried. 
In the cliffs of ae’ river banks, the layers are of variable thickness— 
when affected by the weather, they are quite thin, broken into small 
irregular blocks, and generally they are separated by a thin layer of 
argillaceous earth, like mortar in a wall. The upper beds appear en- 
tirely filled with petrifactions, crinoidea, terebratula, &c. interstrati- 
fied occasionally with others, which contain no organic remains. 
These facts, with some other interesting features, may be conven- 
iently observed on a stream in Leyden, Lewis Co. , (about three miles 
from Boonville,) called “ Dry Sugar River.” “Bout a mile and a 
half from its junction ‘with the Black river, it is compressed into @ 
narrow, irregular, rocky passage, and makes a cascade of sixty feet 
or moré into an expanded basin below—and at high water runs with 
a full channel to its mouth. The banks from the basin are probably 
eighty or one hundred feet high, and continuously form the western 
limit of the great valley of the Black river, which here gradually 
slopes on the west side of Dry Sugar river to an elevation of thirty 
or forty feet, and on the eastern suddenly declines to nearly the level 
of the water. At the common height of the stream, (as at the time 
of my visit,) there is not water sufficient to cover the whole channel 
froma the fall to its mouth, and at half way between the two, the stream 
