PIKE COUNTY. 637 



from their weathered outcrops is quite characteristic, being emphatically 

 a thin soil, slight in volume generally, and so lacking in favorable con- 

 ditions that no ordinary field crops can be raised upon it with profit. 

 Forest trees, however, within quite a limited range of species, manage 

 to grow upon it. In fact, they establish themselves upon raw banks 

 of shale before any such changes have been wrought in it as would 

 make it proper to term it a soil The chestnut (Castanea vesca) and the 

 Spanish oak (Quercus palustris) are every where characteristic trees, and 

 the chestnut oak (Quercus castanea) is also common, though less abun- 

 dant than the first named trees. Fruit trees are also found to thrive 

 well and produce well upon slate soils ; but grasses and cereals either fail 

 altogether in them, or have but a dying life. 



The products of the weathering of the shales are accumulated in the 

 valleys as quite stubborn clays, which contain the elements of fertility, 

 it is true, but which require more careful treatment than they generally 

 obtain to render them at all desirable for tillage. The lands of this divi- 

 sion are, on the whole, decidedly the least productive within the county. 

 If left to produce the only vegetation for which they show a natural 

 adaptation, viz., forest growth and orchards, they can be made to serve a 

 very useful purpose ; but when hill-sides of shale are stripped of their 

 forest growth and subjected to tillage, they soon become as nearly desert 

 as any lands in the State ever become. 



The Waverly soils come next in order. They are in every way more 

 important than the preceding division. They occupy a much larger 

 portion of the surface of the county, covering, in addition to all other 

 exposures, all of the table-lands of the western side of the county; 

 instead, as in the case of the shales, being confined to the slopes of the 

 hills— and they are, besides, much more productive, the farming land 

 which they furnish yielding excellent rewards to skillful husbandry. 

 They vary among themselves according to the character of the particu- 

 lar strata from which they have been formed ; but these varieties are 

 kept within quite narrow limits. But few of the sandstone beds are 

 destitute of clay, and all of the shales contain more or less sand. The 

 percentage of silica is so large in some of the soils that they come under 

 the category of light soils ; but in much the larger number of instances 

 the clay predominates, and a strong, tenacious soil is the result. Most 

 of them are naturally light-colored. They rarely show the reddish tints 

 of the native soils to the westward. They contain in abundance all of 

 the chemical elements necessary for vegetable growth, but under culti- 

 vation they generally stand in urgent need of the amelioration that a 

 good supply of organic matter in the soil furnishes. Their native fer- 



