SOILS OF THE ONONDAGA SALT -GROUP. 179 



wlilch succeed similar shales containing deposits or 

 rounded nests of gjpsum. These rest on a porous 

 limestone, beneath which again occur green and red 

 shales, calcareous and crumbliug like those above, and 

 like them forming rich wheat-soils. It has an average 

 thickness of about 1200 feet, and forms a belt of gene- 

 rally level and undulating land, running east from 

 Syracuse nearly a hundred miles, and west as far as 

 Buffalo, and again beyond the Niagara River, far into 

 Upper Canada. The breadth of this belt at Syracuse is 

 about ten or twelve miles, and it rapidly tapers off 

 to nothing as we go east towards the Hudson River. 

 But westward it first expands, in Seneca and Wayne 

 counties, to a breadth of between twenty and thirty 

 miles, and afterwards continues from sixteen to twenty 

 miles wide for nearly one hundred miles, after which 

 it contracts to about twelve miles, which is its width 

 on the river Niagara. This formation alone, there- 

 fore, forms a large area of rich land. But the coun- 

 try to the north of it, as far as Lake Erie, is also 

 underlaid by rocks which crumble readily, and yield 

 soils of good quality, and generally rich in lime ; while 

 to the south the nature of the rocks, and the agency 

 of those causes to which the spread of drift is owing, 

 have both in p^'t contributed to the production of good 

 grain-growing land. Hence, in the so-called wheat- 

 district of western New York, is included the broad 

 belt of about forty miles in width — from the shores of 

 Lake Ontario, southwards to and including a large por- 

 tion of the Hamilton shales of the New York geologists. 

 As this country presents a really interesting Illustration 

 of the Influence of geological causes on agricultural 

 capabilities, I subjoin a section across this wheat-district 

 at its broadest part, where It Includes the eastern por- 

 tion of the county of Wayne, and a portion of the 

 county of Seneca. 



