BERNARDSTON SERIES OF UPPER DEVONIAN. 281 



woods looking down on South Vernon, which is subdi\-ided 1)}- only verv 

 thin layers of schist. Still farther east, in the large pasture aV>ove the South 

 Vernon Hotel, the beds are greatly faulted, as indicated upon the map. 

 Here pseudoniorphs — biotite after staurolite — occur and show well-formed 

 twins, and a tourmaline granite containing coarse blue orthoclase cuts the 

 schist and makes it gueissoid. 



It illustrates the abundant faulting of the region that at the two short 

 railroad cuts in these beds there are in each case two marked faults, bring- 

 ing quite distant beds into contact. Just south of the South Vernon station 

 nearly horizontal mica-schist is faulted on the north against a dike-like block 

 of massive amphibolite about 33 feet wide, and on the south an ecpially 

 distinct east-west fault line separates the latter rock from the feldspathic 

 quartzite, also nearly horizontal. At the next cutting, 3 miles farther 

 south, near where the road crosses the railroad, one band of the massive 

 amphibolite is i)ushed over another, and the quartzite over both, so that 

 they have a common dip of 25°, S. 65° E.; but the fault planes are dis- 

 tinctly visible, and both the hornblende-rock bands are capped by the 

 whitish schist la'S'er which marks their transition into the common mica- 

 schist. 



The type of the amphibolite or hornblende rock as seen in the area 

 described above and in many bands sti'etching across the country to South 

 Vernon — a type from which there is little variation — is a dark-gray to black, 

 fine-grained, wholly massive rock, resembling so exactly, especially in its 

 jointing', an intrusive diorite that it was connected with the Mesozoic 

 diabase in the first work of President Hitchcock, and at its occun-ence at 

 the South Vernon station, where it is faulted between mica-schist and 

 quartzite, it was called trap by so experienced an observer as Prof C. H. 

 Hitchcock, in his latest work on the area.^ The liornblende is generally 

 arranged in radiated fibrous tufts just visible with the lens, which aid in 

 giving the rock its great toughness. It is not prone to weathering and 

 stands up generally in long ridges, the schists having" been considerably 

 lowered on either side of it, but at the railroad cutting- in South Vernon the 

 fissures were coated with an abundant deposit of calcite and pyrite. (See 

 "Petrogi-aphical description," Nos. 17-20, p. 293.) 



'Geol. New Hampshire, Vol. II, p. 438. 



