PETROLEUM AND NATURAL GAS IN NEW YORK 



453 



be the terror of the driller and could not in any wise escape his 

 notice, but he finds no such hardened material and moreover 

 brings up in the sand pump good sized fragments of all the for- 

 mations that he traverses and these in every case are entirely 

 normal. The thin sheet of Cambrian limestone that lies just 

 below the gas rock and just above the granite is compact and 

 hard to drill but there is no trace about it of metamorphism by 

 heat. 



Precisely the same line of facts comes to view in the deep wells 

 of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. A well was 

 drilled a few years ago at Titusville to a depth of 3553 feet. It 

 is known as the Jonathan Watson deep well. The lowest 

 stratum that the driller reached was the well known and wide- 

 spread red Catskill. This stratum is everywhere inherently red, 

 throughout this part of the country, because of the peroxid of 

 iron that it contains. The fact seems to have deceived at least 

 one driller who is quoted by Prof. S. F. Peckham [Proc. Am. pliil. 

 soc. 1898] as saying: " The soapstone became harder as they 

 went down and was red in color; in fact had been burned like 

 brick/' This statement shows complete misunderstanding of the 

 facts and in reality contains a serious misconstruction of them. 

 , The Catskill beds are a normal part of every section in the 

 region, but below them there are many hundreds of feet of gray, 

 blue and black shales, retaining their fossils and all their normal 

 characters. The redness of the Catskill is in no wise a sign of 

 metamorphism by heat. 



Prof. I. C. White, state geologist of West Virginia, who is our 

 highest authority on all facts in this line, writes as follows: " I 

 have personally inspected the slates in the Wheeling well, 4500 

 feet deep, and in the West Elizabeth well, 5500 deep, and in the 

 latter, after the red Catskill is passed there are no red beds at 

 all. The slates in this well for the last 3000 feet are dark gray 

 or bluish gray, while in the Wheeling well, from which the red 

 Catskill had disappeared to the westward, there were no red 

 beds whatever below the Barren or Elk river series of the coal 

 measures. The same conclusions and facts have been confirmed 

 by hundreds of other deep borings within my knowledge." 



The fact is, the deepest we have ever gone in the rocks of 

 New York and Pennsylvania, the depth in some cases exceeding 



