PIKE COUNTY. 637 
from their weathered outcrops is quite characteristic, being emphatically 
a thin soil, slight in volume generally, and so lacking in favorable con- 
ditions that no ordinary field crops can be raised upon it with profit. 
Forest trees, however, within quite a limited range of species, manage 
to grow upon it. In fact, they establish themselves upon raw banks 
of shale before any such changes have been wrought in it as would 
make it proper to term ita soil. The chestnut (Castanea vesca) and the 
Spanish oak (Quercus palustris) are every where characteristic trees, and 
the chestnut oak (Quercus castanea) is also common, though less abun- 
dant than the first named trees. Fruit trees are also found to thrive 
well and produce well upon slate soils; but grasses and cereals either fail 
altogether in them, or have but a dying life. 
The products of the weathering& of the shales are accumulated in the 
valleys as quite stubborn clays, which contain the elements of fertility, 
it is true, but which require more careful treatment than they generally 
obtain to render them at all desirable for tillage. The lands of this divi- 
sion are, on the whole, decidedly the least productive within the county. 
If left to produce the only vegetation for which they show a natural 
adaptation, viz., forest growth and orchards, they can be made to serve a 
very useful purpose; but when hill-sides of shale are stripped of their 
forest growth and subjected to tillage, they soon become as nearly desert 
as any lands in the State ever become. 
The Waverly soils come next in order. They are in every way more 
important than the preceding division. They occupy a much larger 
portion of the surface of the county, covering, in addition to all other 
exposures, all of the table-lands of the western side of the county; 
instead, as in the case of the shales, being confined to the slopes of the 
hills—and they are, besides, much more productive, the farming land 
which they furnish yielding excellent rewards to skillful husbandry. 
They vary among themselves according to the character of the particu- 
lar strata from which they have been formed; but these varieties are 
kept within quite narrow limits. But few of the sandstone beds are 
destitute of clay, and all of the shales contain more or less sand. The 
percentage of silica is so large in some of the soils that they come under 
the category of light soils; but in much the larger number of instances 
the clay predominates, and a strong, tenacious soil is the result. Most 
of them are naturally light-colored. They rarely show the reddish tints 
of the native soils to the westward. They contain in abundance all of 
the chemical elements necessary for vegetable growth, but under culti- 
vation they generally stand in urgent need of the amelioration that a 
good supply of organic matter in the soil furnishes. Their native fer- 
