PIKE COUNTY. 631 



the "Chimney Rocks," near the mouth of Hickson's Run, of one hundred 

 and eighty-nine feet, as given by barometer. . It consists almost exclu- 

 sively of silicious materials, quartz pebbles, and sand. The stem of a 

 calamite or a sigillaria — well-known coal plants — is occasionally met 

 with. There are streaks of iron in the sand that cements the pebbles, 

 which resist weathering agencies better than even the remainder of the 

 series, and they are frequently left in relief upon the surface of exposed 

 beds. 



The outcrop of the conglomerate in Jackson township is almost always 

 a vertical wall from fifty to one hundred feet in height. A line of weak 

 springs marks its base. Occasional seams of shale are found interstrati- 

 fied with the formation, so that the soil formed from it, though thin and 

 poor, as is shown by the stunted pines and oaks which it bears, is, after all, 

 less sterile than it would have been if composed of the silicious conglom- 

 erate alone. The greater distance of the conglomerate from the river in 

 the other townships named, and the consequent more gradual descent of 

 the drainage, streams, forbids the formation in this area of the precipitous 

 cliffs of Jackson township; nor has the thickness of the stratum been 

 elsewhere found as great as in the section at the Chimney Rocks above 

 reported. 



6. The last element to be named in the scale of the county is a coal 

 seam. It does not, however, occur at the very summit of the series, but 

 is found in certain limited areas interposed between the beds of conglom- 

 erate and coarse sandstone just described. It forms a part of the unmis- 

 takable western boundary of the Jackson county coal field. There seems 

 little reason to doubt that the Pike county seam is the extension of the 

 well-known "shaft coal" of Jackson Court House, which is found in a 

 like situation with reference to the conglomerate. At all events, a seam 

 resting on the conglomerate, and covered by conglomerate, or coarse 

 sandstone, can be followed westward from this last named point to the 

 district now under consideration. Callahan's bank, three miles west of 

 Jackson Court House, where a three-feet seam, which is identical in 

 quality with the shaft seam, occurs ; Whaley's bank, two miles to the 

 west and north from the above named outcrop, where the same three- 

 feet seam has been worked; and Downard's bank, on the western line 

 of Jackson county, where a blacksmithing coal, three feet thick, is now 

 open, connect the coal of section 19, Jackson township, Pike county, so 

 directly with the shaft coal, that there is not much risk in identifying 

 the various exposures as parts of one and the same seam. That the Pike 

 county seam is the- western boundary of the coal field is shown in the 

 fact that the same ledge that holds the coal is exposed for two miles to 

 the westward, from top to bottom, and no trace of the seam is found. 



