400 Miscellanies. 
will be seriously promoted by the facilities which this substance will 
in many ways afford.—Ed. 
6. Geology of the Gold Region of North Carolina. 
(Note from Prof. Mitchell.) 
A letter from Mr. Reinhardt of Lincolnston in this state, is pub- 
lished in the 16th volume of the Journal, with notes by Prof. Olm- 
sted appended, and amongst others the following. _‘‘The account here 
given by a gentlemen, not at all interested in the theories of the for- 
mations, appears to favor the opinion that they are deposits from wa- 
ter and not merely as Prof. Mitchell has maintained in a late volume of 
this work, the result of the decomposition of the associated rocks.” 
I could point out some small errors in Mr. Reinhardt’s letter. The 
mines he mentions were not discovered zs he says in the summer of 
1828, but as early at least, as the spring of 1827. They were visi- 
ted by me in the summer, and described in the fall of that year. But 
I am willing to allow the account to be strictly accurate and impartial, 
although I object to Prof. Olmsted’s inferences. This gold is found 
in the beds of small streams where it lies mixed with rounded pebbles 
of quartz. (See Mr. Reinhardt’s letter.) It is exactly under these 
circumstances that it should be found if my views are correct. Every 
one knows, that the bed of a stream contains rounded pebbles—the 
gold that accompanies them in Rutherford, once lay imbedded in the 
rocks of the neighboring hills, it was liberated from its matrix as these 
rocks underwent decomposition, and carried down during the preva- 
lence’ of violent rains into the bed it now occupies, as is fully stated 
in’ my communication, to which Mr. Olmsted refers. When he shall 
produce a single instance of a collection of rounded pebbles asso- 
ciated with gold upon a rising ground, remote from a stream, he wi 
have advanced something, adverse to the correctness of the views 
advocated by me, and favorable to his own. 
University of North Carolina, Oct. 26th, 1829. 
7. German Collections of Rocks, Minerals, &c. communicated by 
Prof. Hitchcock, of Amherst. 
(To the Editor of the Journal of Science, &c.) 
__Sir—You gave some time ago an account of the terms, on which 
-Moldenhauer, of Heidelberg, in Germany, wished to sell, or 
