OUTLINES. 
127 
eight or ten miles eastward. It is in places much seamed and jointed by 
numerous divisional planes, and often has little or no signs of bedding. 
On the other hand the gneisses of Cleveland and Rutherford are very 
slaty, frequently passing into mica slate; and they are notable as being 
abundantly impregnated with minute crystals of iron pyrites, so that 
copperas has been made from them on a large scale. 
Hornblende slates arc not of very frequent occurrence, but there is- a 
very persistent ledge along the Blue Ridge, across the southern and eastern 
sides of Henderson county, and also in the Saluda and Tryon ranges and 
a few miles east and south of Hickory Hut Gap. And a number of small 
local outcrops of hornblende rocks, slates, and (occasionally) syenytes, are 
found here and there throughout the region, but constituting a very in- 
significant proportion of the whole. Chorite slates occur in a few local- 
ities, as on Lower Creek, in Caldwell county, and a granular talco-chloritic 
rock of a grey to olive color, impregnated with titanic iron is found in 
the northern part of the same county. In this county also are several 
dikes of serpentine, one quite dark and compact, and filled with minute 
reticulations of chysotile veins; the others of a grey color and granular 
texture, one containing asbestos, cbysotile and baltimorite, and walling a 
gold vein. A few other similar dikes are found in other sections of this 
belt. 
The limestones of Forsyth, Yadkin and Stokes, probably belong to 
this series, being interstratified with its normal gneissic roelcs. They are 
coarsely crystalline for the most part, and schistose, in places abounding 
in crystals of a brown mica, (phlogopite). These limestones are slightly 
magnesian and therein agree with those of the typical Laurentian of 
Canada. The following analysis made by Dr. Genth for the Survey, will 
show the composition of this rock at one of the best known localities, 
Bolejack’s quarry, near Germanton : 
Quartz and Silicates, 15.42 
Carbonate of Lime, 74.53 
Carbonate of Magnesia S.22 
Carbonate of Manganese, 0.34 
Carbonate of Iron, 1.49 
At some of the outcrops, which are generally limited to two or three 
rods in thickness, and a few hundred yards in length, the limestone 
seems to graduate into neighboring gneisses. It is only in this north- 
eastern part of the area that limestone occurs. 
The rocks of this belt are very much disturbed and irregular in their 
position, but the strike is very uniformly northeasterly, between 50° and 
