MINERAL RESOURCES OF KANSAS—SALT. 43 looked very well, and much of it was brought up in large cubular blocks, like our Pittsburgh coal. Professor Mudge says this vein varies in thickness from five feet to six feet nine inches. At Lawrence I visited, in company with Judge Bailey, of the Su- preme Court, —to whom I am indebted not only for kind attentions, but for much valuable information, —an establishment on the bank of the Kansas, at the lower end of that city, where they are busily en- gaged in boring for coal by steam-power—using apparatus and going down at arate that could hardly be beaten in our oil regions—averaging ten feet per day. When we were there, they had got down between three and four hundred feet. They are confident of success, but may have to go a thousand feet. I did not hear of any other borings being in progress. In some places in the southern counties coal crops out of the surface, and in the Indian Territory south of Kansas, the above-mentioned heavy vein crops out, and coal is as plenty as it is in Western Pennsylvania. [Since this was written, a vein of coal of good quality, three feet in thickness, has been discovered in the face of the bluff on the south side of the Smoky Hill, a few miles west of Fort Harker, by Mr. Shoe- maker, one of the chief contractors on the Union Pacific Road.] SALT. It will perhaps be new to most of the readers of the Gazette to be informed that salt enough can be made in Kansas to supply the entire country west of the Mississippi. Professor Mudge dwells at great length upon the subject. He speaks of many springs and salt marshes, one of the former of which is near Leavenworth. I make a short quotation : — “The great supply of salt which is to meet the demand for Kansas: and the neighboring States lies at various points in a tract of country about thirty-five miles wide and eighty long, crossing the Republican, Solomon and Saline valleys. [This is north and west of Salina, where I was water-bound for a week.] The signs of the deposit are seen in numerous springs, but more frequently in extensive salt marshes. A description of one of these marshes will be good for large numbers of them, as they are very similar in their formation and appearance. Take that in township 4, range 2, west of the sixth principal meridian in the Republican valley, about seventy-five miles northwest of Fort Riley. It is sometimes called the Tuthill marsh. The valley here is wide, gradually rising to the high prairies so common in that part of the State. The marsh covers nearly one thousand acres more or less impregnated with saline matter. About one-third is entirely void of vegetation, which the brine will not allow to grow. It is perfectly level; and at the time of our first visit was as white as a wintry snow- field with a crust of crystallized salt. ‘The marsh is of recent alluvial