494 
GEOLOGY OF THE FIRST DISTRIOT. 
Talcose slate crops out a few rods east, and white limestone a few rods west of the ore 
bed. Mines which have been and still are extensively wrought, have been opened over a 
distance of more than half a mile in length ; the extent of the bed in these directions is not 
known. Another mine, possibly a continuation of the same bed, has been opened at Squabble 
Hole, about two miles south-southwest of Ameniaville; The ore at this place lies under a 
deposit of pebbles, gravel and loam, about fifteen to twenty feet deep. It is abundant. This 
ore was discovered in digging a well. 
The Chalk-pond ore bed was wrought extensively many years ago. It was abandoned in 
consequence of the water of the pond incommoding the miners. The pond has now been 
drained, and the mine can be worked to advantage. The ore appears well, and will undoubt¬ 
edly make a good iron. This ore bed is about two and a half miles northeast of Ameniaville. 
The ore bed near the village of Amenia (or Paine’s corner, as it has been called,) is the 
one that is best exposed to examination, and from which the greatest quantities of ore. have 
been and still continue to be taken. The position of the rocks, and the geological relations 
as far as known, are represented oa Plate 23, fig. 2. In some places, clayey matter is inter-, 
mixed with the ore. In some places it is red like the earthy red oxide of iron, yellow like 
iron ochre, white like pipe clay, and sometimes it is bluish. The blue clay is not plastic, but 
rather crumbly when wet; and it is more or less mixed with talcy and micaceous matter, and 
contains a multitude of minute but perfect cubic crystals of pyrites. I washed a portion of 
the clay, and obtained thousands of these small crystals, the largest of which were not larger 
than grains of sand. In the bottom of one of the openings where they were excavating the 
ore. Prof. Merrick found masses of crumbling impure- limestone filled with minute crystals of 
pyrites like the clay, and he inferred that the clay came from the impurities of the limestone, 
and that the blue clay was the same as'the limestone, only that the calcareous matter had 
been entirely or mostly removed ; that in the white clay, the pyrites had also been decomposed, 
and entirely removed by the action of water or other agents ; and that in the colored clays, 
the iron had been only partially removed. 
In one of the ore beds, the solid ore was observed to be covered with a deposit of earth 
and fragments of ore, deposited apparently from water, and this was covered by earth mixed 
with gravel and rounded pebbles. Whether this iron ore forms a. bed interstratified with the 
adjacent rocks, or a mere mass in the trough between them, is not known; whether it has 
been formed by the decomposition of pyrites, by the depositions from mineral water, or other 
causes, is not yet known. 
The Amenia ore bed yields the greatest variety of the most beautiful and delicate speci¬ 
mens for a cabinet, of any locality of that ore that I have ever seen. Among the varieties 
of limonite may be mentioned the following, viz : 
