1882 . 
455 
[Merrill. 
The specimen No. 36 of Zirkel’s Report, 1 from Reel Creek, 
IJinta Mountains, is mentioned in the Report as bearing such 
a “ striking resemblance to the well-known beautiful paragonite 
slate from Monte Campione, near Faido, at the St. Gotthard, 
Switzerland, that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other 
— the more so since it contains excellent large crystals of pale 
blue disthene (cyanite.)” Mr. Wadsworth calls this an ordinary 
mica schist and states that it is not a paragonite schist. He 
remarks that he had previously stated that the rock was a mica 
schist similar to many mica schists in New England, and except 
that its color is grayish-white, has no resemblance to the parago- 
nite schist from St. Gotthard. He again lays great stress upon 
the fact that the specimens at the Museum carry no cyanite 2 and 
urges “ that the rocks of the Red Creek district can no longer be 
kept in the abnormal position in which they were placed, through 
Zirkel’s mistake, as an occurrence of hydrous micaceous rocks on 
the Fortieth Parallel — the only occurrence.” 3 Mr. Wadsworth 
has published no positive evidence in this matter excepting to state 
that the schist is similar to many New England mica schists. 
The rest of his argumentation is all of a negative character. I 
have caused a few chemical tests and partial analyses to be made, 
and although at least one if not both of the partial analyses are 
unsatisfactory owing to the difficulty of obtaining the mica free 
from quartz grains, yet I prefer to state both of them. Analysis 
No. 2 was made from a specimen which was crushed and carefully 
“ panned ” in order to separate as far as possible the quartz from 
the mica. Analysis No. 1 gave: K 2 0, 2.4% ; Na 2 0, 1.3% ; H 2 0, 
5.1%. No. 2 gave: K 2 0, 5.13% ; Na 2 0, 2.0% ; II 2 0, 4.9%. 4 
1 The thin sections and corresponding hand specimens at the Museum, now bear 
numbers corresponding to those in Zirkel’s Report, and besides these, new collection 
numbers opposite which may be found, in a catalogue, the old collection numbers. In 
this paper I shall therefore generally quote only the numbers of Zirkel’s Report. And 
since these numbers are arranged in the Report in regular, successive order, it will 
not be necessai'y, generally, to quote the page of the Report. 
2 1 also found no cyanite in the specimens at the Museum, as was stated in my first 
paper, these Proceedings, Vol. xxi, p. 239. 
3 These Proceedings, Vol. xxi, p. 252. 
4 These partial analyses were performed at the Mass. Institute of Technology, and, 
since I have every reason to believe that they were conducted with proper care and 
skill, the difficulty in obtaining good results evidently lay in the nature of the speci- 
men at command. In a section prepared from the specimen the microscope showed 
much quartz disseminated through it. 
