56 GEOLOGY. 
A. §. Packard, Jr., made some remarks on the geology of the 
phosphate beds of South Carolina. During a recent visit to 
Charleston, he had observed the phosphate diggings on the Ashley 
river, and at a locality on the northeast railroad eight miles from 
_ Charleston, but through the courtesy of C. C. Coe, Esq., Superin- 
tendent of the Marine and River Phosphate Mining and Manufac- 
turing Company, and Dr. C. U. Shepard, Jr., he had enjoyed 
special facilities for studying the Quaternary, or Post Pliocene 
formation in which the phosphate bed occurs, having made two 
excursions in company with these gentlemen on the Company's 
steamer Gazelle. He was also indebted to Prof. C. U. Shepard, 
Sr., for much valuable information regarding the chemical as well 
as geological history of these interesting beds. Analogous beds 
have been discovered in the later tertiary of England near Canti 
bridge, but they are becoming exhausted, and manufacturers of 
superphosphates are now importing large quantities of the crude 
phosphate rock from Charleston, S. C., as well as the phosphate, 
or apatite, rock from the Laurentian formation of Canada, which 
Dr. T. Sterry Hunt, the distinguished chemist of the Canadian 
Geological Survey, believes to have resulted largely from the ba 
composition of shells, especially those of Lingula. a 
The phosphate beds of South Carolina are spread over an area 
along the coast one hundred miles along, and about twenty miles 
in breadth ; the formation is not continuous, being sometimes, as 
stated (in conversation) by Prof. C. U. Shepard, Jr., replaced - 
ferruginous sand. It has already been largely used as a fertilizer 
for worn out lands of the Sea Island cotton region, and promises 
from the unlimited supply of the rock, to become a large industrial 
interest of the state, six million dollars having already been 1 
vested in lands and mining and manufacturing materials by north- 
ern capitalists alone. ' a 
The relation of the phosphate: beds to the Quaternary formatio 
of the state and of the latter to the glacial beds of sand and a: 
of the northern states, were, however, the principal points ee 
would allude to. At a celebrated locality of Quaternary fossils at 
Simmon’s Bluff on Wadmalaw Sound, about thirty miles by’ m 
from Charleston, he made with the kind and generous aid of 
Shepard, Jr., a large collection of fossils, from a bed of sand pe 
mud about four feet in thickness. This bed corresponded with a 
marine clays of New England and Labrador, and the ancient ieee 
