164 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



NOTES ON THE PIPESTONE DISTRICT, MANITOBA, 



Read before the Geological Section, HamiUon Association, April 24th, 1S96. 

 BY J. A. DONAGHY. 



Geology — The districts I have been in have not been very favorable 

 for making researches on this subject. In this part of Manitoba we 

 have gravel and sand subsoil. The gravel is composed largely of 

 various kinds of quartz, the remainder being fragments of granitic 

 rocks. They call some limestone out here, but is very flinty in its 

 nature ; and although they make lime from it in some parts, the lime 

 is of a very poor quality and will not boil when put in water. The 

 rock contains a few fossil shells somewhat similar to a fossil found at 

 Hamilton but I cannot recollect its name ; it is fan shaped, some- 

 thing like a scallop. Some of the pieces of quartz would look very 

 nice if polished, as some are quite transparent. Some have fine white 

 lines through them, something like strata of stone. These pieces 

 are about the size of the end of your finger and the lines not much 

 thicker than paper. They are of a yellowish color, some dark 

 amber, and, if cut across, the lines look very beautiful. 



Our surface soil is a scanty soil something like that around Bur- 

 lington, but not (juite so sandy. The surface changes to a clay with 

 clay subsoil a few miles west of here. For sometime I was in what is 

 known as Central Manitoba, at Belmont, about 40 miles south of 

 Brandon. The clay soil there is very often made almost worthless 

 with alkali, and farmers have a hard time to get a well containing 

 water fit for use, on account of the purgative action of the alkali. A 

 poor quality of shale underlies the soil there. It does not seem to 

 contain any fossils, only a fragment of one is found occasionally by 

 looking very closely. The stones on the farms are nearly always big 

 ones — some eight feet in diameter. About six miles north these stones 

 are more plentiful, and protrude above the surface about a foot. 

 There is one peculiar thing about big stones on the prairie that I 

 must mention, that is this, very often these stones are lying in the 



