136 
GEOLOGY OF NORTH CAROLINA. 
feldspathie and quartzose ; and along the northward spur of Hanging 
Hock, hard and gnarled dark grey quartzo-argillaceous slates prevail ; but 
these are also much veined with irregular masses and reticulations of 
epidote. Passing eastward to the Watauga, from Yalley Crucis up the 
river, the prevalence of epidotic and chloritic, massive or obscurely 
bedded rocks, is most striking. Some of the masses are much veined 
with tine seams of white quartz, while others are amygdaloidal, sprinkled 
with grains of gypsum and quartz and epidote ; while still further east, 
across the Rich Mountains, occur chloritic amygdaloids in which the 
grains are feldspar, which are much weathered so as to leave the surface 
of the rock deeply honey combed. Alternating with these conspicuous 
and dominant masses along the river, are the slate and gneiss-like grits of 
Linville, and occasionlly silvery, grey, greenish and spotted argillaceous 
and felspathic slates and shales. 
On Elk River occurs a greenish quartzo-felspathic, thick bedded, com- 
pact to friable slate and grit, which gradually passes into a nacreous light- 
colored, coarse slate-conglomerate, — a fine grained argillaceous quartz- 
yte, filled with rounded and flattened pebbles of white and reddish quartz 
and of hard quartzo-argillaceous slates. 
This conglomerate outcrop has a breadth of several hundred yards on 
Elk, and extends nearly east and west several miles into the mountain 
slopes on either hand. 
The rocks of this rugged region are much disturbed, but the prevalent 
dip is eastwardly, and the strike a little east of north. 
There remains one other Huronian tract, whose formations compose the 
most westerly rocky zone of the State, including the mass of the Smoky 
Mountains and its eastern escarpment for the more part of its course, from 
the head waters of Laurel River in Madison county, near the Big Bald, to 
Cherokee; widening southward, until it includes almost the whole length 
of the latter county, in the transverse section of its strata. This belt I 
have elsewhere provisionally named the “ Cherokee Slates.” 
Two sections of these rocks are given on the map, as they occur on the 
French Broad, and along the Iliwassee, through Cherokee. 
Beginning at the State line in the latter county we encounter, for sev- 
eral miles, a succession of conglomerates and clay slates, drab, blue and 
green, with presently gneiss-like slates and grits and quartzo-felspathic 
rocks, and occasional beds of staurolitic and garnetiferous hydro-mica 
slates. These slates with their characteristic crystals are very persistent, 
being seen conspicuously in Georgia, on the Morganton road ; and also 
northeastwards 4 or 5 miles in the spurs of the Smoky. Hear Murphy 
the grey gneiss-like slates are thickly sprinkled with transverse crystals 
