56 GEOLOGY OF OLD HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, MASS. 



who had owned the land for more than haH" a century, and I asked him how 

 the rock had been discovered in the thick woods. He told me that when he 

 was a small boy his father had cleared the hillside, a desolate slope consist- 

 ing largely of uncovered ledges, and his older brother, while harrowing in 

 oats on the spot, noticed that the harrow teeth made no noise over one por- 

 tion of the ledge, but gouged deeply into the rock. He thereupon took a 

 large piece of the rock home and put it into the fire, but could not melt it. 

 His pyrognostic experiments do not seem to have proceeded much further, 

 but long after, about thirty-five years ago, the owners dug a deep trench 

 into the mass, dumping a great quantity over the bluff", but did not find 

 anything of value for use as soapstone, only a small portion of the rock 

 having completed the change to steatite. 



THE ORANGE AND MONSON AREA. 



This band of gneiss extends nearly across the State as a narrow anti- 

 cline, and near its north line in Orange the axis of the anticline dips down 

 northwardly beneath the fibrolite-schists. Because it yields more readily 

 to erosion, the gneiss occupies the bottom of a deep amphitheater open to 

 the south, its bottom deej^est outwardly, just at the foot of the sharp, high 

 schist hills beneath which it sinks. At its northern end the gneiss is quite 

 granitoid and much disturbed by small intrusions of pegmatite. Around 

 Orange village it is a fine quarry stone. Much of it is a dark biotite-horn- 

 blende-gneiss, much a lighter gneiss containing angular fragments of the 

 darker variety, and very tortuous. 



At the railroad east of Orange village the light-colored granitic gneiss 

 folds around great fragments, or groups of fragments, of the dark hornblende- 

 gneiss, Avhich have been but slightly moved and cemented by the lighter 

 gneiss. In this it resembles the Shelburne Falls gneiss. Two east-west 

 faults, 17 feet apai't, here include a much darker and more hoi-nblendic 

 gneiss. It contains prehnite and stilbite in fissures. All down its western 

 border in Orange its contact with the schists above is more like that of an 

 eruptive with an overlying sedimentary tlian like that between two sedi- 

 mentary beds. At L. Mayo's it is very granitic and is intermixed with 

 the lower schists in a confused way. In the village of Orange, between 

 Main and High streets, it is in direct contact with the hornblende-schist, 

 and it continues in contact with the schist across into New Salem. In this 



