82 GEOLOGY OF OLD HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, MASS. 



liere the serpentine can have at most only this thickness, though it swells a 

 few yards north to treble this thickness at the expense of the steatite, 

 which runs on north for a distance of 492 feet, with a thickness of 10 feet, 

 and enlarges again into a pocket of harder soapstone. 



The deposit extends southward across the road, and is then opened again 

 in a large quarry on the land of Mr. Howard. The New York Metropolitan 

 Company has quarried 200 tons, papng a royalty of 50 cents a ton, and the 

 material was ground at a mill in the valley to the east. About as much 

 more had been gotten out earlier, but no work was in progress at the time 

 of my visit (1877). This is a type of all the serpentine and talc deposits — 

 a lenticular mass of serpentine replacing the amphibolite in its tapper 

 layers, and, as it were, eating into its mass and suggesting strongly that it 

 has been foi'med at the expense of the schist and itself changed later for 

 a varying distance downward into talc. 



In a recent interview published in the Springfield Republican,^ the 

 discovery by Dr. H. S. Lucas of another bed of emery, or the continuation 

 to the north of the Chester bed, is announced. It is at a point a mile east 

 of Middlefield and a mile and a half nearly due north of Chester, on land of 

 Frank Smith, and the land has been pm-chased by Dr. Lucas. It is asso- 

 ciated with hornblende-schist, as is the Chester bed, and is quite certainly 

 the continuation of this bed northward. The specimens from the new 

 locality shown me by Dr. Lucas contain grains of blue corundum. 



Southward on the strike the outcrops are not abundant, but they 

 are sufficient to show that the amphibolite is probably interrupted for a 

 considerable distance, though it may be continued as a naiTow band, some- 

 what shifted by faults. Two miles southeast of the cheese factory it appears 

 again in great force, and immediately to the east of it the serpentine (bed 

 No. 6) appears in still greater force. The two expand rapidly to a width 

 of 200 rods and run as a prominent range of hills over the town line into 

 Chester, di-opping down suddenly to the brink of the Westfield River. On 

 the east and west the vertical sericite-schists, 200 rods apart, inclose this 

 great double bed of amphibolite and serpentine, and are continuous across 

 the river to the south, and the western half of the bed, the amphibolite, also 

 continues across, its eastern half, the serpentine, being replaced by amphib- 

 olite in the bed of the river. The boundary between the two, which may 



' "Another vein of corundum : " Springfield Republican, December 12, 1895. 



