CHAPTEE XIV. 



MINERAL VEINS. 



The only mineral veins in the ai'eaare of the " baryta-lead formation," 

 though in some of the fissures occupied by these veins there seems to have 

 been an antecedent "fluorspar-calcite formation." Many of these veins seem 

 to have been fii-st filled with fluorspar and calcite and various ores. These 

 ai'e now scarcaly represented except by the many pseudomorphs of quartz 

 after fluor and calcite. The circulating waters bearing sihca first dissolved 

 out or replaced the fluor and calcite. This forms the beginning of the 

 second stage of vein filling, and the -^'eins soon became quartz-baiite-galena 

 deposits, with chalcopyrite and sphalerite at times replacing the galena. It 

 is quite possible that the fluorspar-calcite formation dates from the time of 

 the post-Carboniferous folding, and entnely probable that the baryta-lead 

 veins coincided with the folding of the Triassic rocks, since the}' occur 

 both in the Triassic sandstones and in the older rocks. 



All the minerals which occm* in the veins mentioned above are 

 described in detail in the author's Mineralogical Lexicon of the three 

 counties^ and in the supplement to the same in Chapter XXII of this 

 monogi'aph. 



The other beds in which mining is done — the emery bed and the pjTite 

 and hematite beds in the Hawley schist — are in the main contemporaneous 

 beds, intersti'atified with the schists which contain them, and the workable 

 ores were either originally present, as in the emery bed, or were formed 

 largely by replacement of other beds, so that it has been more natural to 

 discuss them in connection with then- counti-y rock. 



Westhampton ; the LoudviUe vein. — On July 27, 1679, the little plan- 

 tation of Nouotuck, now Northampton, held a town meeting and voted, 

 "after much discoui-se and agitation," that the town have a general interest 



' Bull. U. S. Geol. Survey No. 126, 1895. 



