Whether any part of it has a texture sufficiently fine and firm to be wrought to advantage, is yet to be determined. To the eye of a superficial observer, there are many indications that it has. A specimen of very fine white marble, resembling the Italian white, was shown me in Augusta county, Virginia, which was found 15 miles from Staunton, where there is said to be a considerable quantity of it. _Limestone country in Horizontal Strata._ The _second_ great division of the limestone country extends, on the route which I took, two hundred miles from the Cumberland mountain, and others associated with it southwest, as far as the Dividing Ridge, which separates the waters flowing into the Tennessee from those which proceed direct to the gulf of Mexico. The grand circumstance which distinguishes the limestone of this division from that already described, is this, ITS STRATA ARE HORIZONTAL. Frequently immense piles may be seen forming bold precipices, but _always_ in horizontal layers, differing in thickness, from a few inches to many feet. How far this arrangement extends to the west and north, I have not yet been able to learn. Travellers always speak of the limestone rocks in West Tennessee and Kentucky as _flat_, from which circumstance I conclude that the Cumberland mountain forms for a considerable distance at least, the eastern boundary. I have observed but three other particulars in which the strata of the _horizontal_ differ from those of the _inclined_ limestone. 1. Its colour is not so strongly marked with the bluish tinge. 2. It is not so commonly penetrated with white veins of a semicrystallized carbonate of lime; nor is it so frequently associated with the _uneven_ fractured species. 3. Petrifactions are oftener found in it. I will here take the liberty to suggest, whether in our maps of geology, some notice should not be taken of this very important division in the limestone country. Such a division exists _in fact_; nature has made it; and if geology depends on nature for its only legitimate inductions, there can be no reason why a feature so prominent as this, should be overlooked. I shall not undertake to account for their difference: but would not every geological theorist consider them as distinct formations?[31] _Cumberland Mountain._