ON METAMORPHISM IN THE RHODE ISLAND COAL BASIN. 
By T. NELSON DALE* 
Sir Charles Lyell, in a paper read before the Geological Society 
of London in 1844, called the attention of British Geologists to 
the occurrence near Worcester, in Massachusetts, of a bed of 
Plumbago and Anthracite, which he was inclined to believe be¬ 
longed to the Carboniferous Formation. The Geological Survey 
of Rhode Island by Dr. Jackson, published in 1S40, that of Mas¬ 
sachusetts by President Edward Hitchcock in 1841, a short paper 
by the same on the Rhode Island coal field in 1S53, as well as 
two papers by his son, Prof. Charles H. Hitchcock, in i860, have 
clearly established the fact that there extends from the vicinity of 
Worcester, Mass., to the southern extremity of Rhode Island, a 
more or less broken belt of rocks of Carboniferous age ; and these 
writers all concur in describing these rocks as materially different 
from those of the best known coal fields. Instead of bituminous 
coal or of Anthracite, we find there a plumbaginous Anthracite ; 
instead of the accompanying clays and clay-slates, we find clay- 
slates and Mica-schists. The southern portion of the belt, at 
least, is traversed by numerous Quartz veins, and all the rocks 
and minerals of the region indicate varying degrees of metamor¬ 
phism. During the last few years the writer has devoted consid¬ 
erable time to the construction of a geological map of the vicinity 
of Newport, R. I., and of a geological section across the entire 
basin, which at that point measures some fifteen miles in width. 
Since the publication of the results of this work, in extending dur¬ 
ing last summer the observations northwards, I came upon a lo¬ 
cality where the metamorphism of the coal-measures had pro¬ 
ceeded further than it is supposed to have done even in that region. 
The object of this paper is to give a brief statement of these ob¬ 
servations. 
In the western part of the basin, along the West Passage of 
Narragansett Bay, the strata of the Coal-measures are much dis¬ 
turbed, being in places vertical or folded over upon themselves. 
♦Reprinted from “ Proceedings of the Canadian Institute,” Toronto, March, 1SS5, p. iS. 
