SALT- SPRINGS OF THIS DISTRICT. 185 



lands, which have been long under cultivation, has been 

 rubbed off them by ignorant and improvident culture ; 

 but skill, the child of greater knowledge, can restore 

 them again to great productiveness. How far it will 

 pay to improve even this country, for the growth of 

 wheat — as our best English and Scotch farmers would 

 like to improve it — while the still uncleared lands of the 

 north-west are competitors in the wheat-market, I do not 

 possess sufficient knowledge of local circumstances to 

 enable me to decide. 



With Mr Geddes I afterwards visited the salt-works 

 for which this district is so celebrated, and to which 

 the city of Syracuse is so much indebted for its rapid 

 prosperity. 



Salt-springs occur over the whole of this belt of 

 country, from the Medina sandstone to the Portage 

 group inclusive ; and salt has been, or still is, more or 

 less extensively manufactured from them. But they 

 are most abundant, and yield most copious supplies of 

 water, in the Onondaga salt-group, which derives its 

 name from them. In this group they are generally 

 richer also in saline matter, and yield a purer salt. 



As in so many other localities, the gypsum appears to 

 be connected in its mode of deposition with that of 

 mineral salt. There occurs, indeed, in this locality — 

 upon Mr Geddes's farm among other places — a very 

 interesting proof of the close connection of these two 

 mineral deposits. In the green shale-beds are found 

 numerous pseudo-morphous masses, sometimes as much 

 as six or eight inches in diameter, which appear to 

 be casts of the interior of large hollow crystals of 

 common salt, such as are formed, of a smaller size, on 

 the surface of salt-pans, or of bodies of salt-water which 

 are evaporated in the open air. Such hopper-shaped 

 casts, as they are called, were very numerous in the 

 locality in which I saw them, throughout the entire body 



