Polytechnic Association. 741 



It will be seen, therefore, that this ore varies very much in quality, 

 and it might be good policy in a buyer to have the ore of a property 

 analyzed before buying. The last sample by Professor Mallett came 

 from near a property lately bought by a capitalist without such pre- 

 caution. There is another vein of this ore in Alabama, near the 

 Coosa coal held and south of Lookout Mountain. It is of very supe- 

 rior grade. 



From Grade's Gap, southeast, is one of the most wonderful sights 

 ever beheld by the eye of a geologist. The extreme summit of the 

 ridge is a bluff cap of this fossiliferous ore. It looks like great massive 

 piles of granite rocks. I could not believe my eyes until I sent for a 

 hammer, and climbing over these vast masses for miles, continually 

 broke pieces from them to be assured that it was really what I was 

 told. It was at no point less than twenty-five feet thick, and at many 

 points the bluffs rose out of the mountain more than thirty feet in 

 height. There were dozens of vast detached pieces, laying as if 

 chiseled off, any one of which would run the largest furnace in Penn- 

 sylvania for weeks. It was no mere uplift, a mere spurt, but far down 

 the southeast side of the mountain it came to the surface again and 

 again, while shafts of more than twenty feet had failed to pierce 

 through its thickness. It lay like a great flat board all Qn the south- 

 east side of the mountain, nowhere more than a few feet under the 

 earth. I believe it to be the concentration of all the scattered veins 

 which have come down from East Tennessee, here drawn together 

 and uplifted. The Red Mountain Iron Company formerly had a fur- 

 nace within two miles of this ore vein, and owned a mile and a half 

 of it. They made fourteen tons of iron per day with charcoal, using 

 from two to two and a half tons of ore to the ton of pig. A gentle- 

 man formerly connected with them told me that an old Irishman and 

 a colored man would get out and break up in a couple of hours all the 

 furnace could use in a day. I cannot see how it should cost twenty 

 cents per ton to mine this ore, and it breaks up very easily. 



Dr. Litton, State geologist of Missouri, says the iron mountain 

 contains 1,665,280,000 cubic feet of ore, or 230,187,375 tons. If we 

 put the thickness of this vein of fossiliferous ore, at this particular 

 point, at only twenty feet, its length at twenty-five miles, and the 

 slope of the mountain at only three hundred yards, we shall have 

 3,372,000,000 cubic feet, while it is only one-third less heavy than the 

 Iron Mountain, and requires no roasting. There would be, then, in 

 this short space alone, full 4(10,000,000 tons of ore, and this is but a 

 tithe of what exists along the line of the A. and C. R. R., and 



