TUSCARAWAS COUNTY. 15 
and its specific gravity is usually not so high as to arrest attention. Its 
valuable properties are therefore so much masked that it was rather by 
accident than otherwise that Mushet, in 1801, discovered the value of 
the blackband of Scotland, and laid the foundation of the great iron 
industry of that couatry. Toa practiced hand the greater weight of the 
iron-bearing shales will serve for their detection, but where the quantity 
of iron contained can not be conveniently measured, a sufficient test 
will be afforded by burning a heap of the shale in the open air or else- 
where, when, if it contains iron enough to be valuable, this will “loop,” 
as it is said, that is, will agglutinate and form scoriaceous masses of 
great density. | 
When subjected to the action of the weather the blackband ore decom- 
poses like auy other shale, and its carbonaceous matter being removed 
by oxidation, it falls into a mass of thin brown or rusty flakes, which, 
though looking no more like iron ore than the unchanged material, 
should be recognized by the explorer, for this is the only form of the ore 
which will be exposed to his examination in natural outcrops. 
The geological position of the blackband of Tuscarawas county is, as 
has been stated on a preceding page, immediately above Coal No. 7 and 
at the base of the Barren Measures. This is a strongly marked iron 
horizon, although the ore found here varies considerably in character. 
{t would seem that this ferruginous deposit was made by the drainage 
from a surrounding land area into a circumscribed basin of compara- 
tively shallow water. In some parts of this basin carbonaceous mud 
heavily charged with iron accumulated, which subsequently formed the 
blackband; in others clay without vegetable matter, but generally 
containing considerable iron, and this, as is usual in such cases, sub- 
sequently segregated to form nodules of kidney ore. In the deeper 
portions of this basin, where the water was clearer, a limestone was 
deposited, and this also, in some localities, contained iron enough to 
become a valuable calcareous ore, now known as mountain ore. These 
three kinds of material were precipitated almost simultaneously, and they 
are frequently found to alternate one with another, so that along a some- 
what extended outcrop the ore worked will be in one place blackband, 
in another mountain ore, and in a third shell ore; and also on one side 
of a hill Coal No. 7 may be overlain by a sheet of blackband even eight 
or ten feet in thickness, while on the other side of the same hill no 
blackband occurs, but instead some other form of ore,.or even barren 
material. Wherever blackband and mountain ore are found together, as 
they frequently are, the former is always beneath the latter, from which 
we learn that it was really deposited first. Generally, in such cases, 
