PAL.E0NT0L0GICAL report of geological survey. 5B5 



Zanesville, there is above this coal, on the top of Putnam hills, a thin 

 fossiliferous bed of limestone. As for the value of the limestone as a 

 character for identification of the coal beds, a look at both vertical sec- 

 tions, No. 1 and No. 2, of the first report of the Geological Survey of 

 Kentucky, will show its deficiency. The bed of limestone, only four 

 feet thick, of the first diagram, is represented in the second by a heavy 

 formation of two beds of limestone, the one thirty-three feet, and the 

 other eight feet thick, separated by five feet of shales. 



This 3rd coal at Hawesville is about two hundred and ten feet above 

 No. 1, B, the main coal at this place. It has been opened and work- 

 ed for a time and is now abandoned — its thickness being only twenty- 

 two inches. It is covered by a black shale one foot thick, which de- 

 composes in powder under the atmospheric action, and shows no trace 

 of fossils, either shells or plants. Upon the shales there lies another 

 soft and still looser sandy, micaceous, buff-colored shale, insensibly 

 passing into limestone, and full of large Produdus and Spirifer. This 

 shale is like a rotten limestone, and the fossils that it contains, though 

 badly preserved, are easily separated from it. It is overtopped by a 

 bed of limestone. 



Coal No. 4. We had no better opportunity to study this coal than 

 the former, in the coal-fields of western Kentucky. The coal with two 

 clay partings, that is referred by order of superposition to this geolog- 

 ical horizon in Curlew hill, with limestone at a distance of fifteen feet 

 beneath it, I had no opportunity of examining, as the old opening 

 into this coal was entirely filled up, and the roof shales quite inacces- 

 sible. 



At Giger's hill, Union county, we examined a coal three feet thick, 

 with two clay-partings, covered with a bed of five to six feet shales, 

 differently colored, grey or black, becoming soft and finely grained in 

 the proximity of the coal, and entirely covered with prints of Neurop- 

 teris flezuosa, Brt, (pi. 6, fig. 2.) This species, like Neuropteris hir- 

 suta, Lsq'x., is generally too far distributed in the whole thickness of 

 the Coal Measures to afford, by its presence alone, a true reliable char- 

 acter for the geological position of a vein. Though it is most abun- 

 dant in the Pomeroy coal of Ohi -, which would correspond with our coal 

 No, 4> I have found it also in the barren measures between Athens 

 and Marietta, Ohio, above the Pittsburg vein, and even in the shales of 



