No. 50.] 
451 
his wealth, increases his price according to this essentially false esti- 
mate. For it must be considered that years are required to consume 
a marl bed, a peat bog, or a marble quarry ; that the income depends 
on the demand ; and though its stated value may be realized in twenty 
or fifty years, the capital invested in its purchase might, in the mean 
time, and otherwise employed, yield four fold. Like the products of a 
cultivated farm, the returns are constant and slow, differing from that 
only in the circumstance that it is not inexhaustible. 
I would not be understood as attaching little importance to such pro- 
perty. To the farmer the value of a marl bed or a peat bog is im- 
mense ; but 1 would say, that geologists, when occupied in such ob- 
jects as calculating the value of a mass in dollars, while they degrade 
their science, defeat their own purpose ; they mislead those who are 
guided by their representations, and foster the very spirit which their 
researches should allay, viz. the mania of speculatio?i. If such a 
course is pursued, it requires no great foresight to perceive, that want 
of confidence, and finally distrust, will prevail, and geology be ranked 
with the art of the adventurer with the mineral rod. Besides, there is 
confessedly, room for error in estimating the contents of a bed or vein. 
In the 4th District, we know that beds of limestone, marble, grind- 
stone grits, &c. are liable to thin out within a few rods, or they may 
continue for miles : in this state of the case, it is very unsafe to predict 
or infer that one stratum will extend for a distance of several miles be^ 
cause another one has been found to do so, when we know the greater 
number do not. 
These reports are intended to be the medium of information to land- 
holders, farmers and others, of what their domains produce, of their 
application and uses, and the value in general terms. These remarks 
may, perhaps, be out of place in a report of this kind, but I have been 
induced to make them, from th6 many examples which have come to 
my knowledge, where the value of a manufactured or wrought material 
of a mass is given, and the same applied to it in its present or natural 
state, from whence it is plain that loss and disappointment must follow. 
It has before been said that the permanent growth of wealth in the 
Western District consisted in the agricultural value of the land. The 
two northern ranges of counties affording a soil peculiarly adapted to 
grain growing, no country being superior to it ; while the nature of the 
substrata, soil, hills, ravines, and numerous perennial springs of the 
southern tier of counties, characterizes them as grazing lands, and they 
