266 
GEOLOGY OF THE FIRST DISTRICT, 
{m). On Staten island, blackened wood (lignite) was said to have been found in digging 
a well at the depth of sixty feet, about half way between Richmond and the south shore of 
the island. 
in). I found lignite abundantly, in the blue astringent clay containing pyrites, near Ross- 
ville on Staten island. Many specimens of the lignite were bored by the Teredo, and the 
cavities filled with pyrites ; and the fragments of lignite that lay on the surface were covered 
with a white and greenish efflorescence of the sulphate of iron, in consequence of the decom¬ 
position of the pyrites. This locality is in a ravine, where numerous small slides have 
occurred, a little northeast of Rossville, near a small stream.* This blue pyritous astringent 
clay is precisely similar to the dark pyritous clay containing pyrites and lignite, near South- 
Amboy, Matavan point, Cheesequake marsh, and Middletown point, and which underlies the 
green marls of New-Jersey, and overlies the beds of white and mottled clays of New- 
Jersey,i and is the same as the blue and brown pyritous clays above the white clays of Long 
island. The blue clay at the locality near Rossville, where exposed to the weather, was 
* It contains an abundance of pyrites in nodular crystalline masses, and of all the imitative shapes of the segregated clay balls 
of the clay beds of the Hudson and Connecticut valleys. Sometimes a shell, and sometimes a bit of wood, serves as a nucleus. 
+ From the similarity of the clays and sands of Long island and Staten island, to those of New-Jersey below the marl 
deposits, some sections that I made on the north coast of New-Jersey, south of Staten island, where fresh sections were 
exposed by the inroads of the sea at the great storm of the twenty-ninth of November, 1830, and by recent excavations 
at the clay pits, are here inserted. The white and potter’s clays of Amboy and Woodbridge (New-Jersey), are the same 
as those of Lloyd’s, Eaton’s, West and East necks, and other places on Long island. The same may be said of the 
dark micaceous and sandy clay, of the mottled clays, of the sands, gravels, conglomerates, etc. 
1, SectioTis of Mr. Morehouse's clay-fit, on the shore of Raritan bay, half or three quarters of a mile east of South-Amboy 
landing.* 
(a) . Surface sand (not at the pit, but a little south),.... 10 
(b) . White sand with yellow lines,..... 10 
(c) . Yellow clay,.. 4 
(d) . Blue clay, almost white when dry,. 5 
In this lower layer of clay, leaves of various kinds have been found between the laminm. This clay is used in making 
glass-house crucibles. 
2. Section of a clay-fit about one mile east of the preceding. 
A railway of wooden rails is laid from the pit to the bay, where vessels receive their loading from the cars. 
(ffl). Yellow sand,... 4 to 10 
(V). Ferruginous conglomerate,. ^ to IJ 
(e). Variegated clay, yellow and red,. 6 to 7 
(rf). Plastic blue clay, nearly white, down to the level of the bay,... 6 
Now the railroad depot and landing. 
