arrangement of superficial earthy materval. 349 
the explanation of the bed 2. This interpolated bed is a peaty, 
black, gravelly soil, with blackened stems and bark of trees 
and fragments of wood and grass blades, roots and stems. 
The bleaching of bed 2, figure 8, and of ¢, figure 9, is evi- 
dently due to the solvent action of the humous acids from the 
old soils of the slopes from which this deposit came. 
igure 10 is a section in a railroad cut near Statesville in 
Iredell County, which shows two muck beds a, a, in contigu- 
quent and conspicuous of these phenomena are seen, as stat 
above, in the Piedmont. The railroads of necessity follow 
the course of the river valleys, and the sections are conse- 
quently those of the lower ends of the jutting hills and spurs 
= ae slope down into the margins of the plains: that is, 
these deposits, the settling of the heavier elements, can only 
have occurred in consequence of some sort and degree of 
movement of the mass. It is equally evident that such move- 
