NORTH-CAROLINA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY. 125 



92. The washing of the marls should not be confined to 

 the green sand marls, the white eocene marls upon the Neuse 

 in Craven county, may also be profitably subjected to the 

 operation. It would at any rate improve it much, for agri- 

 culture, and serve to create a demand for it in the midland 

 counties. Besides, when it has been subjected to this opera- 

 tion, it becomes an excellent material for burning into quick 

 lime. Being in a tine incoherent state after washing, and 

 also wet or a calcareous mud, it might be pressed at once by 

 means of moulds into the form of large bricks, and when al- 

 lowed to dry, put up in kilns for burning. In western New 

 York, the white fresh water marl is treated in this way, with 

 the exception that it does not require washing. But it is 

 moulded into the form of bricks and burned. It is highly 

 esteemed for its whiteness, and is used mostly for white-wash- 

 ing. 



The foregoing hints are thrown out without having had 

 time and opportunity for testing their value. They are sug- 

 gested in consequence of the scarcity of limestone in the mid- 

 dle counties of the State, and the consequent high price of 

 lime. There is lime enough in the eastern counties, but its 

 intermixture with sand, which diminishes its value in a com- 

 mercial point of view, except in the case of a few banks, 

 which have been designated. 



93. To show that green sand and other marls may be 

 transported over railroads, I propose to quote what has trans- 

 pired already in New Jersey,* thus, there was transported 

 over the Freehold and Jamesburg Agricultural Eailroad du- 

 ring 1856, 270,982 bushels of marl, all of which found a mar- 

 ket out of the marl district, and some of it out of the State ; 

 and as an evidence of the estimation of the marl and the ready 

 sale it finds along the road, it requires only to witness the 

 high cultivation of the lands along the whole route of the 

 road. Monmouth county, and other parts of New Jersey ^ 

 were as barren, or as much exhausted by cultivation, as any 



* Third Annual Report of the Geol. Survey of the State of New Jersey, for the 

 year 1856, p. 53. 



