PIKE COUNTY. 619 



bution along the line of the Scioto valley canal and the Ohio River, had 

 already brought it into prominent notice. 



The Waverly series is by far the most important division of the geo- 

 logical scale in the county. Its horizontal extent, its vertical thickness, 

 its economical products, its relations to the soils, the water-supply, and 

 the topography of the districts which it occupies, all combine to make it, 

 beyond question, the leading formation in this part of Ohio. 



It reaches in the summits of the hills to and even beyond the western 

 boundary of the county, and onty in the extreme north-eastern and 

 south-western corners is it covered with the higher formation 'of the Sub- 

 Carboniferous conglomerate and the thin edge of the Coal Measures. 

 Throughout the central districts of the county, on both sides of the 

 Scioto, it is by far the most conspicuous formation, constituting often all 

 of the visible surface and always all of the highest land. 



Its vertical thickness cannot be measured in any one section. Paint- 

 er's Knob and Jasper Knob — two summits the height of which has been 

 already given — furnish the heaviest single sections, and as each of them 

 takes in more than one hundred feet of Huron shales, they give the most 

 extended general section of the rocks of the county. Not less than five 

 hundred feet of the Waverly series is to.be found here. In the north- 

 eastern corner of the county, in Jackson .township, the series is all em- 

 braced within less vertical thickness than this, for although the bottom 

 of the series does not appear there, a well-marked horizon which belongs 

 at one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty feet above the base 

 can be followed, and measurements can be carried from this to the base 

 of the overlying conglomerate, which shows in great force in all of the 

 highlands in this region. The total thickness of the formation here 

 does not exceed four hundred and fifty feet. There is nothing in Pike 

 county, then, to indicate a greater thickness of the Waverly series than 

 about five hundred feet. 



In composition the series consists principally of shales and sandstones. 

 The order in which the beds are arranged is very much the same in all 

 parts of the county. A general section is appended (see Fig. 2), and a 

 brief description of the main beds will here find place. 



1. The lowermost eighty to one hundred feet of the series consists of 

 blue and drab shales, interrupted with occasional thin courses of solid 

 stone. The boundary between these Waverly shales and the underlying 

 Huron shales is tolerably well marked by the change of color in the beds. 

 The Huron shales are nearly uniform in color and in texture. The 

 change of color, indeed, from black to blue, or drab, with some change in 

 composition also, is the principal reason for making the division between 



