182 Concerning Amber. [ March, 
The northern part of this region, which constitutes the pro- 
montory of Briisterort, is very hilly, and the coast banks are often 
from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet high.. Formerly 
this was all owned and worked by the German government, and 
was watched by gens d'armes; all amber found, even by the peas- 
ants in ploughing, being claimed, the finder, however, receiving 
one-tenth of its value. For the piece in the Berlin Museum, 
weighing eighteen pounds, the finder received a thousand dollars. 
Until ten years ago, during stormy weather, when the waves 
were beaten against the banks of this coast, the amber was 
thrown up in quantities, entangled in the seaweeds, and a hundred 
hands were ever ready to intercept it with their nets, a trying 
occupation, as the roughest storms yielded the richest booty. Of 
late years the diving apparatus has been used so successfully that 
the marine deposit has been greatly diminished, and systematic 
mining is now carried on inland, where the amber is much finer. 
The price of amber has increased during the last year, and this 
advance is caused by the diminution of the yearly product, many 
of the pachters, or renters, having thrown up their contracts and 
abandoned the business of mining on that account. 
It was in this famed locality of Samland, so favorable for geo- - 
logical survey that Prof. Zaddach of the University of Konigs- 
burg, pursued his investigations relating to the birthplace of 
amber, and his report throws great light upon this vexed 
question, 
Taking a section of the cliffs where the geological structure is 
exposed, he finds that wherever the Tertiary formation crops out, 
it always comprises two different deposits. The underlying con- 
sisting of thick beds of glauconitic sand, which sometimes attains 
a height of sixty feet above the sea level, and upon this rest the 
beds of the Brown Coal formation, from sixty to a hundred feet 
thick. Under the green sand lies the sorcalled amber earth, only | 
from four to six feet thick, and underneath this the “ Wilde Erde,” 
so called because containing no amber. 
Sometimes the beds of green sand are cemented by hydrated — 
oxyd of iron into a coarse sandstone which often contains well- 
preserved fossils representing the Tertiary period, but as this glau- 
conitic sand is a marine formation, it follows that the amber it 
contains does not lie in its original bed—that is, not in the soil of _ 
the old forest in which the amber pines grew—but that the amber 
was washed into the sea in which sea urchins and crabs lived. 
