OF ARKANSAS. 2935 
CONWAY COUNTY. 
The northern part of Conway county is skirted by a continuation of the 
same chain of mountains that traverse the preceding counties of Pope 
and Johnson, and has a corresponding geological structure. Sandstones 
of the millstone grit form its summit, overlying flagstones and shale. 
The hills diminish very much in the southern part of the county, seldom 
exceeding three hundred feet, and are composed mostly of thin-bedded 
sandstones, underlaid by reddish siliceous, and dark argillaceous shales. 
In the level portions of the eastern part of the county, the latter shaly 
members underlie the fine tracts of grass land, which affords excellent pastu- 
rage for cattle. 
Thin beds of coal have been opened, in many places, on the waters of 
the Cadron, in the eastern part of the county, and range in thickness from 
4 inches up to 20 inches. In section 7, township 5 north, range 12 west, 
on the Black fork of the Cadron, a 4 inch seam of coal is intercalated 
amongst the shales. It is amore solid coal than those beds previously 
described, in Pope and Johnson counties, highly bituminous and very 
black; it has but little tendency to crumble, and breaks with a smooth 
angular fracture. A few fossil plants were found in its roof shales, 
belonging to the genus pecopteris and ncuroptcris. This is probably a 
different seam of coal from that, before mentioned, on Ilinois bayou and 
the waters of Horsehead creek. It is, however, too thin a seam to be of 
much commercial value. 
Three layers of subcarboniferous limestone crop out on Turkey creek, 
a branch of the Cadron, in all four or five feet thick, dipping about 3 deg. 
south-east. It is a dark, earthy-looking rock, containing encrinite stems 
and indistinct carboniferous fossils. This is the only limestone that has 
been observed, south of Little Red river and north of the Arkansas river, 
in this part of the State; as this rock will make a good strong lime, it is 
important to a country where limestones are seldom accessible. 
In the north-east part of Conway county, close to the Bull mountain, 
the dark shales under the millstone grit are fractured, dislocated, and 
traversed by veins of quartz, associated with talc and other allied mag- 
nesian minerals; the shales, for some distance on either side of these 
veins, are indurated, altered, and more or less metamorphosed. | observed, 
at one locality, an almost vertical bank of dark, siliceous rock, one foot 
wide, charged with iron, and possessing a cubical structure, the blocks 
