On the mineral resources of North Carolina

Reflections on the Nature of Soil and Its Biomantle

“…He defined it as a product (in his view) of abiotic, more or less geogenic (mass transfer) slope processes. Sharpe was apparently unaware that the phenomenon had been frequently alluded to in the nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century geological literature as a “pebble line,”“gravel sheet,” and other names (Mawe 1812; Rafinesque 1819; Olmstead 1825; Rothe 1828; Anonymous 1837; Silliman 1837; Smith 1837; Wilkes 1845; Hartt 1870; White 1870; Genthe 1872; Liais 1872; Le Conte 1874; von Haast 1880; Kerr 1881; Derby 1882; Belt 1888; Cornet 1896, 1897a, b) and even variously illustrated (e.g., Darwin 1840, 1881; Hartt 1870, 31; Webster 1888; Shaler 1891). Neither was Sharpe aware that the same feature had earlier been interpreted in the U.S. midcontinental area as the eroded upper part of a buried soil (the Yarmouth‐Sangamon soil) that had been variously called the “ferretto zone” of Bain 1898, and “pebble band” and “pebble concentrate,” among other names by Sardeson (1899), Calvin (1901), Norton (1902), Savage (1905a, b), Tilton (1913), Leverett (1926), Kay (1928, 1931), and many others.…”