134 Douglass Houghton. — A. Winchell. 
$3,000 for such experiments, and Dr. Houghton located two 
wells — one near Grand Rapids and one on the Tittabawassee 
river. To these enterprises much attention was given, and in 
them many difficulties were encountered during two or three 
years, with an expenditure of $45,000 of special appropriations, 
but without attaining the results expected. The Tittabawassee 
well was carried down 139 feet and abandoned in 1842. The 
Grand Rapids well was sunken 876 feet, and abandoned in 
1843. Had Dr. Houghton been in possession of modern facil- 
ities for boring, he would probably have achieved success in 
the Tittabawassee well, and salt manufacture would have been 
commenced in Michigan twenty years earlier than it was. 
The Legislature of 1838 placed the survey on a broader basis, 
authorizing departments of zoology, botany and topography, 
as subordinate to geology. Besides the requisite attention to 
the salt enterprises just mentioned, Dr. Houghton, this season, 
made explorations along the shores of lakes Michigan and 
Huron, and in some limited portions of the interior and south- 
ern counties. One cannot peruse the report rendered in 1839> 
without receiving a vivid impression of Dr. Houghton's geo- 
logical sagacity. Though he gives expression to certain in- 
ferences and suggestions which later studies have not justified, 
his obvious characteristic as a geologist is largeness of view 
and a tendency to grasp the geology of Michigan in its corre- 
lations with that of surrounding regions. He thinks the rocks 
of the northern part of the Peninsula "may be regarded as re- 
ferable to the great Carboniferous group of the state — a position 
to which their fossil contents are amply sufficient to substan- 
tiate their claim. "^ Again, referring to the range of hills a little 
south of Thunder Bay river which "stretch in a southwesterly 
direction toward the head of lake Michigan," he says "they 
follow the line of bearing of the rock formation, and no doubt 
extend diagonally completely across the state, forming a por- 
tion of the summit of the more northern part of the Peninsula'' 
(pp. 6-7.) "The ridges of limerock," in the vicinity of Little and 
^Such an opinion cannot be considered a disparaging error, since the 
dividing line between the Carboniferous and the Devonian had not 
been clearly fixed in American geology. In his First Annual Report on 
the Fourth District of New York, Janics Hall spoke of the limestones 
of the Helderberg mountains as "Carboniferous or Mountain Lime- 
stone." {Reports N. Y. Geol. Surv., 1837, pp. 290, 300.) A similar 
reference is made of that at Black Rock, etc. (p. 302, note, 307, 374.) 
