Salt formation of Saliiia, N. Y. 141 



provide the means of restoring them with accuracy, if by any ac- 

 cidental circumstance they shall be lost or destroyed. 



Middletown, Conn. September 5, 1830. 



Art. XVI. — Remarks upon the salt formation of Salina, JV. Y. and 

 other places ; by Joshua Forman, Esq. 



TO THE EDITOR. 



Dear Sir, — Since I saw you in January last, I have spent some 

 days in the neighborhood of the Ondago salt springs, and from the facts 

 there learned from intelligent gentlemen as well as from my own pre- 

 vious acquaintance with the subject, there can be no doubt that the prin- 

 cipal grounds on which the new theory of the formation of salt in 

 the salt formation of the canal district, advanced by Mr. Eaton in 

 his survey of the district bordering on the canal are founded in a mis- 

 take as to the existing facts. He seems to suppose the salt formation 

 one of no great depth, which had been bored through without finding 

 rock salt, and from that circumstance, and its not appearing where the 

 rock was cut by streams and gullies, he infers that there are no beds 

 of salt in it; and he seems to fortify himself in this opinion by the 

 fact, that gypsum, one of the principal accompanying minerals, does 

 not exist in that rock : page 1 12, he says " Mr. Byington found the 

 water grew stronger at every foot he bored in the rock at Salina, but 

 after 1^ had bored through the rock he found that he gained nothing 

 by boHng eight feet further in the conglomerate rock beneath it;"* and 

 page 113, "gypsum is never associated with the salt formation in 

 the canal district." The village of Salina is built on a red crumbling 

 rock answering in all respects to the red marie formation of Cony- 

 bear« and Phillips, in which the Cheshire salt mines are situated. 

 This falls rapidly to a marsh extending to the lake. In this marsh 

 Mr. Byington bored through indurated clay gravel to a bed of washed 

 gravel partially cemented together, called by Mr. Eaton conglome- 



* In later publications of Mr. Eaton, he has announced the discovery of pseudo- 

 morphous crystals, in lias and in the rock containing the salt springs of the west ; 

 which, he believes, were made by real crystals of common salt. And, in a paper 

 read before the Albany Institute, he considers the salt-bearing rock as of such a 

 thickness, that Mr. Byington's borings could not have reached its lower surface by 

 two or three hundred feet. Therefore he leaves the question respecting the exist- 

 ence of rock-salt, undecided in his own mind. — Ed. 



