1874.] 299 [Hagen. 



"According to Hotsman, who has examined the Prussian mines, 

 the amber seems not to be in contact with the pyrites, but the mines 

 are worked in a bed of coarse sand below." Mr. Hotsman, by the 

 way, a person entirely unknown in Prussia, seems to have visited the 

 mines worked twenty-four years at the end of the last century, near 

 Great Hubnicken. These mines were undoubtedly situated in lignite 

 strata, and only those strata could have been chosen for a comparison 

 with the Maryland strata, and not at all those later discovered in a 

 greater depth in the so-called blue earth, which is always below and 

 never above the coarse sand. 



I am sorry that there is not a piece of Maryland amber at hand. 

 But the determination by Dr. Troost is to be accepted as correct, 

 because the remarks of the author prove his acquaintance with this 

 fossil, the more so as retinasphalt from the Magothy River, at Cape 

 Sable, was chemically analyzed by him, and the analysis published. 

 (c. /. Gmelin Handb. Chemie, 1866, p. 1836.) 



A scientific opinion concerning the relation of the amber strata in 

 Maryland, and the stratum of the blue earth in Eastern Prussia, is 

 still impossible, and necessarily depends on a careful and more ex- 

 haustive examination of the American locality. It seems evident 

 that the strata, twenty to twenty-five feet thick, at Cape Sable, be- 

 long to tertiary lignite-bearing strata, a fact corroborated by later 

 published geological maps, giving the geological formation of Mary- 

 land as eocene and miocene, analogous to the geological formation of 

 the Samland coast in Eastern Prussia. Even the first stratum of Dr. 

 Troost, the fifteen to sixty or seventy feet sand above the amber 

 stratum, is apparently not to be separated from the lignite stratum. 

 The word alluvium, used in the beginning of the paper, designates 

 only what Werner calls aufgeschwemmte Gebirge — alluvial moun- 

 tains — and not the terms alluvium and diluvium used at present 

 as counterpart of the tertiary rocks. 



As the only rich bed of amber in tertiary layers now known is that 

 on the coast of Samland in Eastern Prussia, a more thorough exami- 

 nation of the locality of Cape Sable would afford perhaps a great 

 interest for science and commerce. For practical purposes it would 

 be important to ascertain whether the bed of amber is sufficiently 

 rich to be worked, or whether the pyrites could not be used with 

 profit for the manufacture of sulphuric acid. 



With regard to the scientific question, it would be necessary to 

 form a complete collection of samples of the different strata. A 



