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THE JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY.

could possibly exist without its presence having been revealed and its course traced, with all the widespread mining and exploring which has been conducted in this region during the past seventy years. Neither can one see how the solutions could traverse the intervening great thicknesses of water-soaked sandstone without becoming diffused, in great part at least. The failure to find such a passage and the absence of the ores in the beds assumed to have been traversed, though evidence of a negative character is so strong that it becomes almost positive value in support of the theory of lateral segregation.

Dr. Jenney, in support of his position, recognizes systems of fault fissures in the ore districts of both south-western and south-eastern Missouri, which cross each other in different directions; these, he considers, served as channels for the metal bearing solutions, and the association of the fissures with the ore bodies he adduces as evidence of such derivation. The deposits of the south-western portion of the state occur almost exclusively in the Mississippian or Lower Carboniferous limestone. Cross fissures or fault fissures in the rocks, if they exist, are not very apparent. The strata are undoubtedly very much shattered in certain limited areas, and have been subjected to extensive subterranean erosion and corrosion and great silicification. Of a system of extensive or considerable faults, recent stratigraphic work in this region has, however, revealed nothing.

In the Cambrian limestones of the eastern part of the state the conditions are somewhat different. Crevices and fissures are there plainly developed, and evidence of considerable faulting is indubitable. In Franklin County such vertical crevices have supplied large quantities of ore. In that portion of the south-east to which reference is especially made, however, and which has produced by far the bulk of the lead, the crevices, whether marking faults or not, are of insignificant dimensions, and the experience has been that they contained themselves little or no ore. On the contrary, the great ore masses consist of galena disseminated through a thickness of the country rock, often of fifty feet or more. At Bonne Terre a tract of 1300 feet long by 800