No. 50.] 
231 
as rich as the specimens they exhibited to me, it would be important for 
exploration. As they did not communicate to me the locality, I can 
form no judgment of its importance. 
A *'coal mine" has been opened in Sullivan county, about 1| miles 
west of Red Bridge, which latter place is where the line between Ulster 
and Sullivan is crossed by the Delaware and Hudson canal. It is abed 
of black carbonaceous shale, 4j to 5 feet thick, with thin seams of an- 
thracite interlaminated, from the thickness of paper to that of thick 
pasteboard. The shale contains vegetable impressions similar to some 
of those at Carbondale. It has been opened on the right bank of the 
Sandberg creek, about 30 feet deep in the dip of the strata, and a seam 
of pure anthracite is said to occur in the shale, six to nine inches thick. 
I did not see this, the mine being filled with water. A shaft has been 
sunk — feet, with the expectation of striking the coal at the depth of 
aboout 150 feet, and of finding it there to be thicker. The strata dip 
about 30° to 40° to the west-northwest, and there is so little back to the 
seam, at such depths as would be of easy drainage, that if a coal bed of 
5 feet thick could be found there, it is perhaps doubtful whether it could 
compete successfully with the Carbondale and other coal beds of Penn- 
sylvania. It could not perhaps be drained without expensive and pow- 
erful steam engines and pumps, to a greater depth than 200 feet, giving 
a back of about 100 yards in the direction of the outcrop, or 100 tons 
of coal per yard in length of the seam for each yard in thickness. 
It is presumed there are no seams of workable coal in this vicinity, 
still, if there is a coal formation in the portion of the State under my ex- 
amination, it will probably be found in this region. From the Shawan- 
gunk mountains westward by the mine, the whole series of rocks in this 
part of my district, are upturned on their edges. The rocks at the 
mine are 1,000 to 1,500 feet above the fossiliferous slaty grits. These 
grits abound with the most beautiful fossils, about ^ mile east of the 
mine. At no great distance westward of the mine, the strata become 
nearly horizontal, conforming to the general position of this series of 
rocks in Sullivan, Ulster, Greene, Delaware and Schoharie counties. 
Flagging stones, grindstones, <^-c. 
The only rock of the Catskill mountain series that is applied exten- 
sively to useful purposes, is a bluish gray slaty sandstone, which is 
quarried as a flagging stone. It has various local names, as the Sau- 
gerties, Kingston, Coxsackie, and North River flag stones. This stone 
