COLES COUNTY. 105 



clays and gravel, and sometimes without obtaining even then an ade- 

 quate supply of water. 



At Mr. Treophiltjs Van Doren's, on Kickapoo Creek, there is a 

 deposit of chocolate-colored sandy loam two and a half to three feet 

 thick filled with fragments of partially decomposed or carbonized vege- 

 table matter which was once without doubt a surface deposit. It is 

 associated with a bed of brownish gray pipe-clay, and is overlaid by 

 gravelly drift clays. This old soil has been passed through at other 

 localities in digging wells in this county, at a depth of thirty to fifty 

 feet froni the surface, and its position appears to be below the drift 

 clays, and above the quicksands that usually form the lowest part of 

 this formation. The gray pipe clay at Van Doren's is apparently a 

 good potters' clay. In digging and boring through the drift deposits in 

 this county, veins of inflammable gas are sometimes struck about the 

 horizon of this old soil, derived probably from the partially decomposed 

 vegetable matters with which it is filled. Trunks of trees and smaller 

 fragments of wood are frequently found in sinking wells through the 

 drift deposits in this portion of the State, and these constitute the only 

 fossils hitherto obtaiued from it in this county. Probably if the quick 

 sands below the hard pan were accessible, some remains of fresh water 

 or land shells might be obtained from them, but no traces of either fresh 

 water or marine animals have as yet, so far as I know, been fouud either 

 in the brown clays or the blue hard pan of the drift. 



Coal Measures. 



The stratified rocks of this county all belong to the upper Coal Mea- 

 sures, and correspond very nearly to those already described in Cum- 

 berland, except that the Fusulina limestone is rather thicker and more 

 evenly bedded in this county than it is further south. The course of the 

 Embarras river still follows the trend of the strata, and the limestone 

 alternately appears above and then sinks below the level of the river 

 bed. 



At Hanging Eock, just above the Cumberland county line, a bed of 

 soft concretionary sandstone may be seen at the base of the bluffs, 

 extending from thirty to forty feet above, and also projecting below the 

 level of the river bottoms. It shows no regular lines of bedding in the 

 lower part of its outcrop, and the rock is so soft and crumbles so easily 

 under a blow from the hammer that at some localities it is difficult to 

 obtain a good hand specimen. A little further up the river there is 

 about fifteen feet of dark-bluish shale cropping out beneath the sand- 

 stone. 



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