THE TIMBER BELT OR SABINE RIVER BEDS. 33 



deposit, but without iron ore, and containing glauconite grains which are 

 often as much as one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. This bed is seen near 

 Jacksonville, and in other places in the northern part of Cherokee County, 

 but no fossil remains have as yet been found in it. 



The town of Palestine is situated on a series of glauconitic, sandy, and 

 clayey beds, the greensand containing many Claiborne fossils. Going 

 west, the land gradually drops to the Trinity River bottom, and six miles 

 west of the town we come to the Saline. This is a flat plain one mile wide 

 from east to west and a half mile from north to south. A small stream run- 

 ning through it has lately been dammed up to make a fish pond. Incrusta- 

 tions of saline matter are seen all around the water edge. The surface of the 

 Saline is a black or dark lead-colored clay, like that at Grand Saline, in Van 

 Zandt County. On all sides of the Saline rises a ring of hills reaching sixty 

 feet and more above the pond. In many places on the top and slopes are 

 seen outcrops of a white chalky fossiliferous limestone with dark specks (glau- 

 conite). The fossils have been determined by R. T. Hill as belonging to the 

 "glauconitic" beds of the Upper Cretaceous epoch, and possibly represent the 

 Ripley Group of Alabama. [This locality is over fifty miles east of the main 

 Cretaceous area of Central Texas, and doubtless represents the remains of an 

 island* in the old Tertiary sea.] The limestone contains seams of yellow 

 crystalline calcite, varying from a fraction of an inch to three or four inches 

 in diameter. 



The limestone is surrounded, and in many cases covered, by the Lower 

 Tertiary clay and by river alluvium. The Tertiary clay is stratified in thin 

 laminae, sometimes with like laminae of sand, and is black, gray, or yellow in 

 color. The limestone is not seen continuously all around the Saline, but out- 

 crops in many places, especially on the north, west, and east sides. It is also 

 seen in low outcrops on the south side, but to the southeast the hills are 

 twenty to thirty feet higher than elsewhere, and it is probable that the lime- 

 stone is concealed under the overlying clay. The clay has been cut in many 

 places by gullies, which head at the ledge of limestone, and show the latter 

 to have a very abrupt slope. Capping the limestone in some places is a more 

 or less ferruginous brown shell rock one to twelve inches thick. It is full of 

 indistinct shells, or casts of them in calcite, and in places is very sandy. It is 

 not found in a continuous bed, but as flat fragments, very numerous in some 

 places and entirely wanting in others. Overlying this, and sometimes at- 

 tached to the fragments of it, is a yellowish dun-colored sandstone, in flat 

 slabs one-half to three feet thick. It is probably the indurated part of an 



* Lawrence C. Smith mentions several other localities of similar islands in East Texas, but 

 they have not yet been visited by the writer. " The Iron Ore Region of Northern Louisiana 

 and Eastern Texas," by Lawrence C. Smith, pp. 22, 23. 

 C 



