CHANGE IN THE SURFACE. 155 



a line of fifteen large cars, containing each from forty 

 to sixty passengers, so that we proceeded very slowly, 

 and had become somewhat impatient of delay. A few 

 cheers from the assembled crowd, rather faint compared 

 with those which afterwards bm'st forth at some of the 

 succeeding stations, were the only demonstrations of 

 affection towards Mr Clay which I observed among the 

 western Romans. 



On leaving Rome, we forsook the valley of the Mohawk, 

 and, in a south-westerly direction, crossed the Clinton 

 group of green, sandy, ferruginous and calcareous shales, 

 which, from their softness, have been much washed away, 

 when the old sea-currents swept over them, and now 

 form a flat, uninteresting, somewhat swampy country, 

 stretching in a narrow zone along the whole of western 

 New York, as far as the Falls of Niagara, and thence 

 into Upper Canada. The largest and deepest depression 

 in this belt of country is occupied by Lake Oneida, 

 which we passed a few miles to our right, and by the 

 marshes of the town (ship) of Cicero, which extend 

 farther towards the south. 



Nine miles from Rome we passed Verona, another 

 memento of Italy ; and a few miles farther, Oneida 

 station, where we rapidly crossed a narrow belt of the 

 Niagara group, the first of the upper Silurian system, 

 and entered upon the Onondaga salt group, the most 

 economically and agriculturally valuable of all the rocks 

 of western New York. The natural softness of these 

 groups of rocks in this locality, and the level character 

 of the whole country, may be judged of from the fact 

 that the Erie canal runs through it for sixty miles 

 without a single lock. 



A single glance at this country, from the time we left 

 Verona, showed into how different a region we had come 

 since we had left the Mohawk Valley. A flat forest 

 country of mixed wood, with few clearings, resting chiefly 



