552 VALM 3NT0L0GICAL REPORT OF GEOLOGICAL SURVEY. 



The barren measures, from the Pomeroy coal up to the great Pitts- 

 burg vein, are perhaps not as well developed in the western coal-fields 

 of Kentucky as in the great Apalachian basin; but, following our 

 general remarks, all the strata have necessarily thinned somewhat 

 westwards. Nevertheless, the space occupied in Kentucky by these 

 barren measures, is three hundred feet thick, which is as much as in 

 some places of Pennsylvania and Ohio. It is true that the measures are 

 not entirely barren in western Kentucky, since there is a coal, No. 5, 

 four feet thick, at ninety-five feet above No. 4. But the same vein is 

 well developed in Ohio, near Athens, at one hundred feet above the 

 Pomeroy coal, and in Pennsylvania, where the barren measure take 

 their greatest developement; the same coal, one foot thick, is general- 

 ly found at about fifty feet above the Mahoning sandstone, which rest 

 upon the Pomeroy coal, and is seventy feet thick. This great sand- 

 stone, which is sometimes a bed of conglomerates, follow westward the 

 same decreasing progression as the true conglomerates of the coal meas- 

 ures. 



Nos. 6 and 7 coal, generally thin beds, have, in the western coal- 

 fields, taken the place of the limestone of Pennsylvania, according to 

 this principle, that where a quiet water is high, and the marine element 

 predominating, a limestone may be formed, when at the same time, in 

 more shallow marshes, the plants will grow, and their remains make a 

 deposit of coal or shales ; for it is evident that though the whole of 

 the Coal Measures appears to have been horizontal, at least at some 

 periods of formation, there has been, in different places, some depres- 

 sions, forming lakes in the peat growing marshes, and that these lakes 

 had to be filled by sand or by formation of shales, or of limestone, 

 before they could again be covered with vegetation, and consequently 

 with coal. 



If the examination of the fossils of No. 8 coal, shows it to be the 

 true coeval of the Pittsburg vein, we have, from it to the highest point 

 of the Coal Measures, as far as they have been surveyed in the United 

 States, another striking analogy in the position of the veins of coal, 

 and their respective distance in both the coal-fields of western Ken- 

 tucky and Pennsylvania. Admitting the coal marked three feet five 

 inches, in the great limestone of Pennsylvania, as our .No. 11, with 

 which it is in perfect concordance by its fossils, and admitting that our 



