IO NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



With regard to the adjudication of important issues now in the 

 courts and arising from the situation at Saratoga, the State Geolo- 

 gist can have nothing to say, but he can and desires to emphasize 

 the fact that the relations of the mineral springs to each other and 

 to the gas springs are a strictly geological problem. These rela- 

 tions must be understood before any determination of intelligent 

 modes of reclamation can be hoped for, and should be compre- 

 hended before any readjustment of recognized rights in the prop- 

 erties involved is attempted. This geological problem is not an 

 easy one. No such problem, deeply buried out of sight and reached 

 only by the drill, is easy. There is probably no place where the 

 subterranean conditions at Saratoga are paralleled and the ob- 

 scurity of their interrelations makes the problem of the source and 

 durability of the waters, their salinity- and their pressures one of 

 difficult reach, but the analyses can not be prosecuted by any other 

 mode .of attack than the geological. 



The Saratoga springs have been a fruitful source of theories and 

 vagaries by casual geologists, chemists, mineralogists and hydrog- 

 raphers, which are so frequently contradictory and have been 

 so often exploited, as to- weaken confidence in most of the solu- 

 tions proposed. So often have favored contentions for and 

 against one or another exposition of the conditions been promul- 

 gated from the witness stand and elsewhere that the present situa- 

 tion leaves everything to be desired in regard to exact knowledge 

 as a basis of procedure on the part of the State, if the Saratoga 

 springs are to be effectively protected. 



With full realization of the seriousness of the problem there 

 presented and of its difficulties, the State Geologist organized a 

 resurvey of the Saratoga springs region during the past season. 

 This survey was, of compulsion, confined to a review of the sur- 

 face structures of the country. It was fully understood that such 

 an undertaking, unsupported by the drill, must be inadequate in its 

 results, for in a subterranean problem the drill is the geologist's 

 finger. Appropriations, however, were wanting to carry on this 

 extensive but essential part of the work. The records of the many 

 commercial wells put down at Saratoga are lost or inaccessible, and 

 no conclusions of the problem can be reached and no> proper pro- 

 cedure for the conservation of the springs be deduced until re- 

 drilling over the extensive area has been carefully executed. 



The field work of the season was not, however, without good 

 results in its bearing on the problems at issue and the survey of 



