14 GEOLOGY OF OHIO. 



quarries are found. There is nothing to excite surprise in these new 

 facts, for both gypsum and salt are the products of geological accidents 

 and can be found in formations of every age, unless it be the oldest. 

 Wherever, by warping of the crust, bodies of seawater have been exposed 

 to evaporation these products are bound to appear. 



The Saiina period is an important one in the New York scale, a 

 thousand feet of deposits being credited to it, and there are probably 

 some deposits in Ohio that are contemporaneous with it in age ; 

 but it cannot be the gypsum-bearing beds of Ottawa county that 

 held this place, unless the formation is made to take in at least one half 

 of the entire series that we now call Lower Helderberg or Waterlime. 

 This gypsiferous series proves to be of considerable thickness and to be 

 wide-spread. It is struck in scores of walls that have been recently 

 drilled in northern and central Ohio. In Sandusky, gypsum was found 

 in quite pure and thick beds, through several hundred feet of the strata 

 through which the drill passed, and in the deep wells of Cleveland, Wads- 

 worth and Akron both rock salt and gypsum are found in large and 

 economically important deposits. The salt beds of Cleveland are found 

 at a depth of about two thousand feet below the surface of the lake, in 

 the latter named stations at a depth of two thousand six hundred and 

 fifty to two thousand eight hundred feet below the surface. Small 

 deposits of gypsum have also been found in the deep wells of Columbus, 

 Newark and many other towns in this same association. 



The reference of distinct portions of our geological scale to the 

 vSalina period must be discarded lor the present, at least, on the grounds 

 that have now been given. 



7. The Lower Helderberg or Waterlime Formation. 



TV e interval that exists between the Niagara and the Devonian 

 limestones is occupied in Ohio by a very important formation. This 

 formation was first separated from the previously undivided mass of the 

 Cliff limestone by Newberry in 1869. He found and identified its fossils 

 and showed by means of them and by the position of the stratum in our 

 series, that the rocks of this interval are the equivalents in part, at least, 

 of the Waterlime of the New York scale. The Waterlime of New York 

 is classed by most geologists with the Lower Helderberg series ; but 

 Hall counts it the upper member of the Saiina group of that state, a ref- 

 erence that seems likely to be ultimately considered the true and 

 proper one. The name is most unhappily chosen. Strictly applicable 

 to only an insignificant fraction of the beds of this series in New York, 

 we are still obliged to apply the designation Waterlime, with its mislead- 

 ng suggestions to all the deposits of the same age throughout the 

 country. The name is in fact a type, or representative of a class of 

 names that ousrht never to be introduced into science. 



