Geology is the science that investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic Kingdoms of Nature.  In order to render intelligible the statements that are to follow, a brief account will here be given of the geological series of the State, and its geological structure.  The geological structure of Ohio is as simple as that of almost any other 40,000 square miles of the earth's surface.  So far as its exposed rock series is concerned, Ohio is built throughout its whole extent of stratified deposits; or, in other words, of beds of sand, clay and limestone, in all their various gradations, that were deposited or that grew in water.  There are in the Ohio series no igneous nor metamorphic rocks whatever; that is, there are no rocks that have assumed their present form and condition from a molten state, or that subsequent to their original formation have been transformed by heat.  The only qualification which this statement needs pertains to the beds of drift by which a large part of the State is covered.  These drift beds contain bowlders in large amount that were derived from the igneous and metamorphic rocks that are found around the shores of Lakes Superior and Huron.  But these bowlders are recognized by all, even by the least ob servant, as foreign to the Ohio scale.  They are familiarly known as "lost rocks" or "erratics."  If we should descend deep enough below the surface, we should reach the limit of these stratified deposits and come to the great foundations of the continent which are the surface rocks ill parts of Canada, New England and the West. The granite of Plymouth Rock underlies the continent.  But the drill has never yet hewed its way down to these massive 

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bed within our boundaries, and thus expose them to view.

THE GEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF OHIO OF MARINE ORIGIN.

     The rocks that constitute the present surface of Ohio were formed in water and none of them have been modified or masked by the action of high temperatures.  They remain in substantially the same condition in which they were formed.  With the exceptions of the coal seams and a few beds associated with them, and of the drift deposits, all the formations of Ohio grew in the sea.  There are no lake or river deposits among them; but by countless and infallible signs they testify to a marine origin.  The remnants of life which they contain, often in the greatest abundance, are decisive as to this point.  The sea in which or around which they grew was the former extension of the Gulf of Mexico.  When the rocks of Ohio were in process of formation, the waters and genial climate of the Gulf extended without interruption to the borders of the Great Lakes.  All of these rocks had their origin under such conditions.  The rocks of Ohio constitute an orderly series.  They occur in wide-spread sheets, the lowermost of which are co-extensive with the limits of the State.  As we ascend in the scale, the strata constantly occupy smaller areas, but the last deposits, viz: those of the Carboniferous period are still found to cover at least one-fourth of the entire area of the State.  Some of these formations can be followed into and across adjacent States in apparent unbroken continuity.  The edges of the successive deposits in the Ohio series are exposed in innumerable natural sections, so that their true order can generally be determined with certainty and ease.  For the accumulation and growth of this great series of deposits, vast periods of time are required.  Many millions of years must be used in any rational explanation of their origin and history.  All of the stages of this history have practically unlimited amounts of past time upon which to draw.  They have all gone forward on so large a scale, so far as time is concerned, that the few thousand years of human history would not make an appreciable factor in any of them.  In other words, five thousand years, or ten thousand years, were too small a period to be counted in the formation of coal, for example, or in the accumulation of petroleum, or the shaping of the surface of the State by the agency of erosion.  The time that has passed since man has been in the world has been computed by some geologists as less than half of one per cent, of the entire time occupied by geological history.  It is true of geological history as it is of human history, that it begins far this side of the beginning of things.  Geology shows us that the existing system of things had a beginning with a time very long ago as measured in years when this section was in the bottom of a great sea of wide area but not of very great depth, - a time when the waters of the Gulf of Mexico covered all the basin of the Mississippi and the place now occupied by the lower of the great lakes, and sent one broad arm through north eastern Canada to join the Arctic and another across Mexico to join the Pacific.

PREHISTORIC CONDITIONS.

     There were then no Appalachian mountains, but to the east of their present position, and to the north of the Great Lakes, there lay a large continent on whose shores played the waves of this great sea, and over whose surface rivers were flowing, bearing their sediments into its waters.  In the depths of this sea, at about north latitude 41 degrees and west longitude 81 degrees, were being deposited layer upon layer, the massive rock foundations of that structure which, when it shall rise 4,000 or 5.000 feet high, shall bear upon its top, as a modern skyscraper bears a roof garden, the little area familiar to us as Mahoning county.  The nearest land was several hundred miles to the northeast, and but little clay and sand can drift so far from shore.  The climate was of a tropical warmth.  Winter had not yet come to cast his mantle of snow and ice each half-year over nature.  Life was swarming, but how different from the life of today.

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There were no fishes in that ancient sea but the waters were rich in lime which they had dissolved from the rocks, and those forms of life which needed this material to build themselves shells for protection or structures to support their soft tissues, were in their element.  Corals grew all over the sea bottom and stone lillies sank their roots into the soft sea-bed and sent their stems upward with their bud-like bodies at the summit.  Molluscs, animals  arms similar to cuttle fishes, each ensconced in the end of a long tapering chambered shell, preyed upon whatever was unlucky enough to come within reach of their long sucker-tipped arms;  microscopic forms of life were there in abundance, and their tiny shells of lime contributed no small part to the massive foundation layers; swimming animals called trilobites, each looking much like a huge sowbug, two feet long, and covered with a horny shell whose segments were so jointed as to permit the animal to roll itself into a ball like the armadillo, were present in immense numbers.  Nor was vegetable life entirely wanting, for there were traces of seaweeds in those early rocks.
     For long ages the cast-off shells of all these forms of life accumulated on the bed, crumbled to pieces and hardened into limestone hundreds of feet in thickness.  It was then that the famous Trenton limestone was formed, which in the western part of our State yields such a copious flow of gas and oil when penetrated by the drill.  It has never been reached here, for it probably lies nearly 4,000 feet below the surface.  It is extremely doubtful, however, whether it would yield returns if we were to reach it.
     But by this time the continent of North America was steadily but slowly rising, the sea which covered its interior was getting shallower, and the shores of the continent to the east and north-east were getting nearer and nearer to the area we are now considering.  Occasionally, when the waves and current were strongest, some clay or sand from the shore would drift over it.  Thus some beds of shale and sandstone were sandwiched in among the heavier layers of limestone.  Some dry land had now appeared to the southwest near the future site of Cincinnati, and the sediment came from that direction also.  At length the amount of sediment drifting in from the surrounding land areas became so great as to fairly exceed the deposits resulting from the accumulation of the remains of corals and shellfish, and there succeeded a long period in which, while there were still some limestones, clay and sand were swept in so abundantly that shales and sandstones became the prevailing rocks.
     There appeared at this time the first of the backboned animals in the form of fishes, but very unlike the fishes of today.  There were sharks whose mouths were literally full of teeth, set like cobble-stones in a pavement.  There were fish with the long conical teeth of reptiles, and with bodies covered all over with great plates, like those of the alligator, except that they were heavier and more bony; they were the ironclads of those seas, and were giants of their kind, for some of them are thought to have been more than thirty feet in length.  The long leathery stems of sea-weed grew luxuriantly, intertwining to form veritable Sargasso seas on the surface of the water.
     Steadily during all this time the continent was emerging from the sea; steadily the land area to the northeast had been extended toward us.  From the area of dry land which had appeared about Cincinnati, a long low arch extending northward through the western part of the State had risen above the water.
     At length when another two thousand feet of the ample foundation upon which Mahoning county rests had been laid down, consisting of great beds of shale, some black with the abundant organic matter buried in them from which oil and gas may be generated to serve man in some far-distant future, others red with iron, others blue and clay-like, all interspersed with an occasional bed of limestone or sandstone, this long age came to an end.  A new era was dawning.  The sea had now be come so shallow that occasionally the waves disturbed it to its bottom, and thus coarse material was transported a long way from shore.  A bluish-grey sandstone 50 to 100 feet in

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thickness was spread above the shales.  This - one of the upper stories of our sky scraper - is the Berea sandstone so extensively quarried for building purposes in northern Ohio.  It lies near the present surface in the northeastern part of the county, but is several hundred feet below it in the southern part.
     The condition changed again, and material was deposited which hardened into shales and shaley sandstones and flagstones.  Once more the transporting power of the water was increased and an immense sheet of coarse sand and gravel, 150 feet in thickness, was gradually spread over this region.  This is known as the conglomerate, because it is full of pebbles it forms the foundation upon which the productive coal measures rest; above it coal may lie, below it never.

FIRST LAND PLANTS, ORIGIN OF COAL FIELDS.

     Ere long, here and there in the shallowing sea, some low and swampy areas began to show themselves above the surface.  The roof of our structure is beginning to appear.  Over these swampy areas slowly crept the vegetation, which had previously grown upon the nearest land, and for the first time land plants took root within the limits of our Mahoning county.  The swamp areas extended and the plants, stimulated by a climate of tropical warmth and abundant moisture, spread and grew ranker until the entire surface of the county was one continuous marsh covered with a dense and tangled vegetation of most luxuriant growth.  This is the opening of the Carboniferous period - that period in the history of the earth which witnessed the laying down of the great coal fields of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
     What a strange scene would have been presented to view could we have been permitted to gaze upon the vegetation of our county then.  Ferns were everywhere - ferns which sent their straight and leaf-scarred trunks twenty and thirty feet into the air, while upon their summits were majestic and graceful crowns of spreading fronds that would make the possessor of the finest botanical garden of today green with envy.  Strange and mighty trees grew on these marshes, whose trunks and few branches were shaggy with the long strap shaped leaves that covered them.  The trunks of some were fluted like Corinthian columns, and all were beautifully marked with leaf scars.  There are now no trees at all like them.  The straight tapering stems of rushes, slightly resembling the scouring rushes of today, but almost tree-like in size, were clustered over the marshes in impenetrable thickets.  We would look the earth over now in vain to find such wealth of plant life as then struggled for existence in the marshes that covered Mahoning county.  But among all this wealth of tropical vegetation there was not one plant on whose branches a single flower unfolded its petals in the sunlight.  No butterflies or honey loving insects could live in that flowerless world.  No bird sang to his mate among those trees or winged his flight above them.  The highest animal to be found in our county then were reptile-like creatures which, like frogs, passed through a tadpole stage in their development.  The atmosphere was too heavy laden with moisture and stifling gases for the higher land animals.
     For ages the leaves, trunks and branches fell upon the marshes, and accumulated peat.  But along with the general uprising of the continent as a whole, there seems to have been in this coal field a gradual sinking, though at a varying rate.  When the sinking was slow, the peat accumulated so as to build the surface up as rapidly as it sank, thus preserving the marsh; but at intervals the sinking became to rapid, the marsh plants were drowned, the sea again prevailed, and sediment was deposited over the peat.  Smothered decay, under great pressure, transformed the peat into coal, and the sediments above it hardened into shales and sandstones.

FIRST PERMANENT DRY LAND.

     How many times coal-marsh and sea alternated over this period it is impossible to say.  In some parts of our county there are the remains of seven of these old peat marshes in

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the form of coal beds, one over the other, with intervening beds of shale and sandstone.  Yet some time before the close of the coal period the uprising of the continent as a whole brought this county well above the level of the sea, and made it permanently dry land.  Then streams began to flow over its surface and to excavate their valleys.
     Upland vegetation took the place of that which had covered the marshes.  This new growth consisted largely of cone-bearing trees, but very unlike the pines, spruces and hem locks of today.  None of them had the needle shaped leaves common in the cone-bearers familiar to us, but instead their leaves were flat and more or less strap-shaped.  Instead of bearing their seeds in cones, they bore nut-like fruits.
     We now reach a period when the geological history of our county is interrupted, at least so far as we can learn from any deposits at or beneath its surface.  Geological history is written in the seas and along the shores and only in very exceptional cases on dry land.  Certain changes that have taken place in our county since it became permanently dry land are apparent.  From a position at the sea level it has been raised until now its highest point is 1,343 feet above it, or about 565 feet above Lake Erie.   When the last seam of coal was formed over its surface it was level, like the marsh in which was formed the peat that preceded the coal; now the coal seams descend about 200 feet in passing from the north to the south line of the county.   It is evident, too, that great quantities of material must have been removed from its surface.  Every rain drop that falls on bare ground moves some tiny particles of earth from a higher to a lower level; every rill that trickles down the hillside bears with it some material it has gathered; every stream in flood-time is loaded with sediment; and so it has been eer since rain began to fall and streams to flow over our surface.
     Prof. Dana, who is regarded as one of our most conservative authorities, thinks it probable that at least 12,000,000 years have elapsed since the close of the coal period, and if our county became dry land before its close, it must have been exposed to the action of the elements much longer.  If we assume the time to have been only 10,000,000 years, and the average rate at which the surface has been worn away to have been the same as that at which the basin of the Mississippi is now wearing away, namely one foot in 5,000 years, we reach the conclusion that a layer 2,000 feet thick has been carried away from the present surface of Mahoning county.  This may seem startling to one who has given the subject but little thought, but it is probably under rather than above the truth.  Many beds of workable coal, with their intervening layers of shale and sandstone, probably once lay above the present surface, but the destroying tooth of time has been gnawing away at them until we have but a mere remnant left.  Nature, has her economies, but, from a human standpoint, she has her wastes as well.

AGE OF REPTILES:  FIRST MAMMALS.

     The coal age was followed by the age of reptiles, some of which were probably the largest land animals that ever lived; while the forests of broad-leaved evergreens were gradully gradually replaced by those of needle-shaped leaves bearing true cones.  Timidly among the strange reptiles appeared the first land mammals, small in size and low in structure.  Gradually the reptiles declined while the mammals grew larger and more numerous, until they became the rulers of the forest and the plain.  Is it possible I am speaking of Mahoning county when I say that the elephant and the still larger mastodon there in all probability cropped the tender herbage and blew their shrill trumpets in the forests; that the howl of the hyena was heard in the hills; that the saber toothed tiger made his lair in the thickets and the rhinocerous forced his way through the dense underbrush; that troops of wild horses galloped across it and occasionally the camel and the tapir were found within its borders; that in the woods and by the streams were parrots and trogons and flamingoes, and other

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birds found not only far to the south? Yet such in all probability was the life of our county in that age.

THE GLACIAL PERIOD.

     Toward the close of this age the seasons became more marked.  Something much like winter came with each round of the sun, and for the first time snowflakes whitened the surface of our county.  As the result of causes not yet well understood, the temperature continued to fall and the winters grew longer and longer.  Soon on the highlands of Canada more snow fell each winter than the summer's sun could melt away, and the edge of the snow mass crept southward.  The ice age was coming on.
     The tropical plants of our forests gradually disappeared to be replaced by the deciduous trees, and these in time gave way to the hardened pine, spruce and hemlock, which waged a gallant but losing fight with the oncoming cold.  Our birds and animals sought a more congenial clime to the southward.  At length there came a summer in which the snow that had fallen over the desolate surface of our county the previous winter did not all melt away; the close of the next summer saw it deeper still.  The ice age had come.  For centuries the snow deepened.  How high it piled above the surface here we cannot tell, but in New England it covered the White Mountains, 6,000 feet high, and here it may have been 2,000 feet thick or even more.
     Along with this accumulation of snow, and probably one cause of the cold at that time, the highlands of Canada were uplifted several hundred feet above their present level.  The snow compacted in its lower parts into ice by the weight of the mass above, and forced southward both by the slope and the pressure of the deeper accumulations to the north, was transformed into a mighty glacier which began its slow but resistless march southward.
     The surface of our county then was much more rugged than it is now, for it had been dry land for millions of years, and the streams had cut very deep valleys across it.  The moving glacier acted upon this broken surface like an immense rasp, of which fragments of hard rock frozen into its under surface formed the teeth.  Moving from the northeast it cut away all portions of the surface, but, as it bore hardest on the hills, the general effect was to destroy inequalities, though soft strata were cut away more rapidly than were hard ones.  Our rocks, wherever exposed, show the planed and grooved characteristics of glacial action.  How much soil and rock this immense ice-plow shaved off from the surface, or how long our county was subject to its action, we cannot say.  Finally, however, the rigors of the long winter began to soften.  Once more the melting exceeded the snow fall, and the ice-sheet was doomed.  Slowly grew thinner and slowly its southern edge receded northward.  It was long after this change began before even the southern border of Mahoning county peered out from under its cover of ice, and much longer still, for the change was slow, before the ice had retreated beyond the northern boundary.  As the glacier melted away, the immense amount of material which it had torn up from the rocks beneath, much of which had been pulverized as though ground between the upper and nether mill stones, was left unevenly distributed over the rock surface, and it is this material, known as the "drift," that constitutes our present soil.

EFFECT OF GLACIAL ACTION ON THE LANDSCAPE.

     The rounded gravel knolls so common in the southwestern part of our county and the less common gravel ridges, are characteristic of glacial deposits, and are supposed to mark the places where the edges of the ice remained nearly constant for a long time, the rate of melting being just equal to the onward motion of the ice.  Thus a heavy belt of material, forming what is called a Morain, was accumulated along the ice front.  Detached masses of ice sometimes became deeply buried in these deposits and when long afterwards they melted, the gravel above them settled down.

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leaving peculiar pits and amphitheater depressions among the gravel knolls.  This is the origin of some of our small lakes and catholes.  To these causes we owe the variety of soil, and, to a certain extent, the variety of landscape found in different parts of our county.
     Since the final retreat of the ice our streams have been steadily at work cutting their way through the drift.  Of the stream channels cut in the rock previous to the ice age, smaller ones were probably obliterated by the grinding action of the glacier, but some of the larger and deeper seem to remain even yet, though deeply buried and sometimes completely choked by the drift.  The larger of our new streams as they found their way over the drift seem generally to have followed the course of the old channels, but they are some times compelled to turn aside, and in that case they soon cut through the drift and have since been flowing over rocky beds, which, like that of Niagara, have been excavated since the retreat of the ice.  The boulders or "hard-heads" of granite and allied rocks so frequently strewn over our surface, are not our products.  They were produced in the highlands of Canada long, long ago, packed in ice and imported duty free.  Theirs was a long, hard journey of hundreds of years, and it must have been tedious even for a boulder.  Only the most hardy among them survived to reach their journey's end, and they had their once sharp angles worn off and many had one or more faces ground smooth where they were pressed against the bed rock beneath the glacier and forced onward.

SURFACE FEATURES OF MAHONING COUNTY.

     Viewed as a whole, the surface of Mahoning county may be regarded as an undulating plain, sloping gently to the north, its southern line running on or near the divide between the waters of the Mahoning on the north and the Little Beaver on the south, and having an altitude of from three to five hundred feet above the valleys of the north border.  Topographically, the county forms a portion of the highlands of the southern rim of the lake basin, but since the rim is cut through by the deep gorge of the Mahoning, the drainage, though locally northward, is all carried through that channel into the Ohio.  But little of the surface is even locally level, but consists of an alternation of broad valleys of excavation, separated by rounded hills and table lands, with gentle slopes.  It is all varied and picturesque, while at the same time it is well adapted for agricultural purposes, and is now very generally in a high state of cultivation.  The soil is in some places derived from the decomposition of the underlying rocks; but it, for the most part, rests upon a sheet of drift material, for the county lies within the drift area, though reaching its margin on the south.  The general slope of the surface, and part of the local erosion, seem to have been produced by the southern extension of a tongue or lobe of the great glacier, which, moving from the north, excavated the low country that lies between the highlands of Geauga and Portage on the west and those of Pennsylvania on the east.  By this agent the northern out-crop of rocks which underlies the county have been ground away, and a large amount of material transported southward from its place of origin.  As the eroded rocks were largely sandstone and conglomerate, much of the transported material is sand and gravel.  Glacial marks are seen on the exposed surfaces of the harder rocks in nearly all parts of the county, and they are especially noticeable on the sand stone ledges on the northeast side of the Mahoning in Youngstown and Poland and on the higher strata of the same character in the southern part of Canfield and Ellsworth.  The direction of the glacial scratches is nearly north and south; but they are sometimes reflected by local impediments a few degrees either east or west.
     One of the most interesting features in the surface geology of Mahoning county is the deep erosion of the valley of the Mahoning.  In Trumbull county the river flows through a gently undulating country, and its banks are so low that it can hardly be said to have a well defined valley.  This is due to the general

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prevalence of soft, shaley rocks which have been broadly and evenly eroded.  Soon after entering Mahoning county the river encounters the conglomerate and the heavy bedded sandstones that overlie the coal.  These form bold bluffs which gradually approach, until at Lowell, the valley is quite narrow and about three hundred feet deep; for the search for oil, which has been made at numerous points between Youngstown and Newcastle, Pennsylvania, has shown that in this interval the river is now running considerably above its ancient bed.  At the State line it was found necessary to sink through eighty feet of sand and gravel in the old channel before solid rock was reached; and in some wells, near the junction of the Mahoning and Chenango, pipe was driven one hundred and forty feet to the rock.  These facts were among the first observed of those which led to the discovery that our principal rivers were flowing at a lower level when the continent was higher than now; the valley of the Mahoning, which is evidently excavated from the solid rock, must have been cut out when the drainage southward was much freer than at present, and this seems to have been one of the channels through which the lake basin, filled to a much higher level than now with water, communicated with the Ohio, and thus with the gulf.  The fact that rock is frequently seen in the bottom of the river does not conflict with the statements made above, for the stream does not follow the line of its ancient bed; but when the old channel was filled, and the work of excavation began again, the course of the river crossed projections from the sides of the valley, and in these places has a rock bottom.  The borings to which this reference has been made prove that there is a continuous, deeply excavated trough running beneath the bottom land of the valley.

GEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF MAHONING COUNTY.

     The rocks which underlie Mahoning county, all belong to the carboniferous system.  They include exposures of the Waverly at base, the conglomerate and the lower group of coal seams, except the uppermost, No. 7, with their associated sandstones, shales, lime stones, fire clays and iron ore.  The dip of all the strata is toward the southeast, from ten to twenty feet to the mile; and as a consequence the outcrop of the different members of the series form irregular belts, conforming to the topography, but having a general east and west direction; but the outcrop of the rocks, which are lowest geographically, being lowest topographically, are found on the northern margin of the county, while the highest cap the hills along the southern boundary.  The extensive explorations for coal in Mahoning county show that the Waverly rocks for a. long time formed the surface, and were extensively eroded before the deposition of the next succeeding rock, the conglomerate.  Hence its upper surface is very irregular, showing hills and valleys over which the conglomerate and-coal measures were deposited, sometimes in local depressions with Waverly borders, so that both are found at a lower level than the adjacent outcrop of Waverly rock.  This has produced much confusion in the search for coal; but all the drillers have noticed that the surface of the Waverly is reached at various depths and that hills of "bottom rock" cut out the coal.  In such cases the coal was never formed on these hills, but had accumulated in lower ground surrounding them as a bed of peat that reached to a limited distance up their sides.

CONGLOMERATE.

     Probably but little of the area of Mahoning county is underlain by the conglomerate.  Patches of it are found in the northwestern corner, and these may extend for a long distance southward; but the great sheet of conglomerate which occupies Geauga county and the northern part of Portage county, thins out rapidly toward the east and between Niles and the State line it either does not exist, or is represented by a thin bed of sandstone with out pebbles.

FAMOUS COAL OF MAHONING COUNTY.

     Coal No. One. This is the seam which furnishes the famous Brier Hill, or Mahoning coal, so extensively used for iron smelting and widely distributed through the markets of the northwest.  It is the same seam that is so largely worked in western Pennsylvania.   The true position of this coal seam is from twenty to fifty feet above the conglomerate.  The quality of the Mahoning Valley coal is so excellent and the coal field lies so near the Great Lakes market that it has become the basis of an extensive commerce, and the mainspring of the most important iron industry of the West.  The first development of coal mining in the valley of the Mahoning took place at the old Brier Hill and Crab Creek mines near the north line of Youngstown.  The search for coal has radiated from this center in every direction, and as a consequence the country about Youngstown has been more thoroughly explored than any other part of the county.   A number of extensive basins have been discovered here, and several of them have been extensively worked.

FOSSIL NUTS AND FRUITS OF THE CARBONIFEROUS AGE, FOUND IN MAHONING COUNTY.

     In the shale over coal number one, in Youngstown, also in the carboniferous sand rocks which cap the hills, are to be found beautiful specimens of the fossil nuts and fruits of the carboniferous age.  Among the varieties found near Youngstown are the following: Trigonocarpon Triloculare, Trigonocarpon Tricuspidatum, Trigonocarpon Fragariordes (Mill Creek Park), Cardiocarpon Elongatum, Cardiocarpon Anulatus McGinnisii - this last named specimen was discovered by Mr. W. H. McGinnis, local geologist for Mahoning county - also fine specimens of the Rhabdocarpon Adamsii.  The species known as Trigonocarpon Gigantum has also been discovered here, but is very rarely met with.  It is more abundantly found near Lisbon, in Colum-

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gravel exposed.  The following letter from Professor Orton shows the great importance of the discovery:

     Ohio State University.  Dept. of Geology.
               Columbus, Ohio, Jan. 29, 1898.
Prof. W. H. McGinnis, Youngstown.
     My Dear Sir:  The skull proves to be musk ox, which has never been reported from Ohio before, the only two specimens ever having been reported found in the United States was one from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and one from Arkansas.  You have by your discovery and contribution to this Institution contributed to science a most valuable specimen, and for which you have the thanks of the Institution.

     Many other beautiful specimens of fossils have been found at various times in the rock stratas and coal measures of Mahoning county, which time and space will not now permit us to enumerate.
     In the treatment of this subject.  Local Geology, or the Geological Formation of Mahoning County, the writer has endeavored to be practical, not drawing from the imaginary, but from the real facts as found in the great book of Nature; for what are the different stratas of rock but pages from the great book of Nature, created by God's own finger?

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