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To the east are the Henry Mountains, a group of volcanic domes that rise above the region. The rocks of the country are limestones, sandstones, and shales, originally lying in horizontal altitudes; but volcanic forces were generated under them and lavas boiled up.
In places the bed of the river is of sandstone or limestone, in other places of lava, showing that it has all been cut out again where the sandstones and limestones appear; but there is a little yet left where the bed is of lava. What a conflict of water and fire there must have been here! Just imagine a river of molten rock, running down into a river of melted snow.
This little torrent, whose dark waters gushed over the limestones that lined its bottom, was nothing less than one of the many sources of the Susquehanna; a river to which the Atlantic herself has extended an arm in welcome. It was at this point that the powerful team of Mr. Jones brought him up to the more sober steeds of our travellers.
They left the pier at eight o'clock, taking at first a short easterly course to avoid a sinister ledge of limestones jutting from the water like crocodile's teeth, which first obtained notoriety in English history through being the spot whereon a formidable Danish fleet went to pieces a thousand years ago.
Thus in soluble rocks, such as limestones, joints enlarged by percolating water are sometimes filled with metalliferous deposits, as, for example, the lead and zinc deposits of the upper Mississippi valley. Even a porous aquifer may be made the seat of mineral deposits, as in the case of some copper-bearing and silver-bearing sandstones of New Mexico.
Limestones, moreover, such as the Italian travertins, are here and there precipitated from the waters of mineral springs, some of which rise up from the bottom of the sea.
About a hundred miles further south, but still in Alberta, we have the well-known Crow's Nest Mountain, a lone peak, which consists of these same Algonkian limestones resting on a Cretaceous valley "in a nearly horizontal attitude," as G.M. Dawson says, which "in its structure and general appearance much resembles Chief Mountain," another detached peak some fifty miles further south, just across the boundary line in Montana.
Taylor's way had led him and his party over a deep fresh-water lake, four miles long, which was only surface frozen this lake was full of algae. The gravels below a promising region of limestones rich in garnets were washed for gold, but only magnetite was found.
Below this zone, on the boundary line between the Lias and the strata of which we are about to treat, called "Trias," certain cream-coloured limestones devoid of fossils are usually found. These white beds were called by William Smith the White Lias, and they have been shown by Mr. Charles Moore to belong to a formation similar to one in the Rhaetian Alps of Bavaria, to which Mr.
In specimens, where the change has been less complete, when moistened and examined under a strong lens, the most interesting gradation can be traced, some of the rounded particles retaining their proper forms, and others insensibly melting into the granulo-crystalline paste. The weathered surface of this stone, as is so frequently the case with ordinary limestones, assumes a brick-red colour.
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