156 GEOLOGY OF ILLINOIS. 



pendicular bank ten feet high. Similar exposures of the same light reddish 

 or brown sandstone, occur here and there along the creek to the county line, 

 and below, into Greene county. 



In the village of Murrayville, and its immediate vicinity, two or three borings 

 have been made, in two of which coal is reported to have been met at depths 

 of one hundred and seven, and one hundred and twenty feet. This coal was 

 reported as overlaid by sandstone and black slate ; but in neither case did the 

 boring penetrate the coal more than twenty-three inches. It may, possibly, be 

 the same vein as that which is worked on Coal creek 3 and which I have referred 

 with doubt, to No. 3, of the general section, or possibly, another higher vein; 

 the known facts are, however, not sufficient to decide the question with cer- 

 tainty. 



The principal natural exposures of the Coal Measures in this county, which 

 remain to be mentioned, are those on the main Apple creek and its principal 

 tributaries. The greater portion of the eastern and northeastern townships of 

 Morgan county, are upland prairie, where all the older formations are deeply 

 buried under the heavy accumulations of Drift, and where none of the streams, 

 which here take their rise, have cut down through these Quaternary deposits 

 to any considerable extent. 



In the northeast quarter of section 18, township 13, range 8, on the north 

 fork of Apple creek, I observed an exposure in the side of the bluff, of about 

 twenty-five feet in vertical hight, the upper twenty feet of which is an arena- 

 ceous shale, and the remaining lower portion consists of one or two thin beds 

 of limestone, with black carbonaceous shale, and fire clay, and in some places, 

 one or two inches of coal between the dark colored shale and the fire clay. The 

 limestone afforded a few fossils, chiefly of one or two species of Bclleroplion 

 and Cyathoxonia. These lower beds may be traced along the banks of the 

 creek for about half a mile, although the exposure is not continuous, and then, 

 the dip of the strata being, apparently, a little greater than the fall of the 

 stream, and in the same direction (about southwest), it finally disappears be- 

 neath its bed. A little below where these beds disappear, I observed in one 

 of the side ravines running down from the northward, heavy exposures of a 

 massive brownish or reddish sandstone, having, probably, a total thickness of 

 over thirty feet. A similar sandstone is said to occur some two miles above 

 this point on the creek, but it escaped my observation while examining this 

 region. This sandstone contained a few impressions of plants, generally very 

 imperfectly preserved, but no other fossils were obtained. 



Continuing down the ravine of the creek about half a mile further, I ob- 

 served a place where there had, apparently, been limestone quarried, though 

 the ledges were not visible at the time of my visit. From the appearance of 

 the fragments, I judged it to be an irregularly bedded, light grayish, fossilife- 



