THE PERMIAN SYSTEM IN KANSAS. 25 



wise the pot were inverted. But to the geologist, the 

 flower-pot is the mound itself: for the slopes of the latter, 

 like mos't exposures of these clays elsewhere, are strewn 

 with mineral blossoms of divers colors and constitute a very 

 respectable geological bouquet. Light-red, dark-red, bluish- 

 red, pink, greenish-white, bluish-white and gray, mixed in 

 confusion with red in the ascendancy, give much of the out- 

 crop of this terrane a variegated aspect; or as viewed at 

 some distance, a hue approaching the late fashionable color 

 known as "crushed strawberr}'." The surface is often 

 strewn with fragments of white, pink, red or water-clear 

 satin-spar flecked with green or red clay, and is sometimes 

 also set off with sparkling cr3'stals of selenite. For such a 

 member of the Salt Fork division, a geological posey-bed 

 in appearance, the designation, "Flower-pot," seems very 

 natural, and it is doubtful if a more appropriate name of 

 local geographic origin could be found. 



As seen in canyon walls or other vertical exposures, 

 the satin-spar forms a network with irregular rhomboidal 

 meshes. It lies, in fact, in a trestle-work of warped plates 

 traversing the clay in all directions, but chiefly in oblique 

 positions tending toward horizontal. The clay is thus in- 

 closed, sometimes between tortuous subhorizontal and sub- 

 parallel seams, sometimes in spacious sublenzitoid compart- 

 ments subject to partition in various directions by intersect- 

 ing veins. The seams vary from mere paper-seams to 

 plates several inches in thickness. 



A noticeqble and picturesque feature of the Flower- 

 pot clays is the manner in which their outcrops are carved 

 by the elements. They are, in fact, a theater of rapid ero- 

 sion, and many weird spectacles present themselves in their 

 relief-forms. In localities where their protective covering 

 of Medicine Lodge gypsum has been removed by erosion, 

 as for example, near the head of Little Mule creek and in 

 the district between Eldred and ^F^tna, they are frequently 

 cut into rather steeply ^oped faces having that peculiar pat- 



