Featherstonhaugh s Geological Report. 105 



fuci all belonging to the seaweed tribe of plants,* these must 

 have grown upon the flat bed of the sea. It is evident, there 

 fore, that all the beds had been bent up by some action from 

 below, and that, from some inequality in the action, or from 

 some external cause, the bed on which they lay, together with 

 its associate strata, had collapsed towards the centre, in such 

 a manner that they would appear to have been thrown up 

 into a vertical position, if the incurvated part had been con 

 cealed. 



A few miles from this remarkable gap, on the road towards 

 Frostburg, a change in the formations takes place ; the sand 

 stone becomes micaceous, and the shales alternate with bands 

 of limestone. The country now rises over Dan s mountain, 

 the eastern limit here of the Western bituminous coal field, to 

 Frostburg, ten miles from Cumberland, and it is in the vicinity 

 of this place, which is about eighteen hundred and fifty feet 

 above the level of tide-water, that those fine veins of bitu 

 minous coal have been opened which are hereafter, when the 

 canal is finished, to come in competition with the other bitu 

 minous coals on the Atlantic border. One of the veins here, 

 of which there appear to be four regularly developed, giving 

 twenty feet of coal, is ten feet thick, and would be all of a 

 very excellent quality, if it were not for a deposite of shale, 

 from six to twelve inches thick, in the centre of the vein. A 

 very great advantage which this coal, in common with all the 

 bituminous coal mines of the West possesses, is, that in 

 consequence of the deficiency of the several formations of the 

 geological column, which has been before mentioned, and the 

 elevation of the region above the river levels, the coal is 

 excavated with comparatively little cost, and, dipping genily 

 to the west, the drainage is easily effected. The hydrates of 

 iron, also, of this neighborhood, are very promising, but the 



* Some of the recent species of fuci are many hundred feet in length, and 

 have a small bladder at the end of their leaves, by the aid of \vhich they float. 



