Guano is the accumulation of the excrement of birds (or of other animals like bats) on areas so dry that, though soluble, it is not leached and washed away. It may also contain some of the bones and mummified carcasses of the birds which died on the spot. The greatest of these deposits are on several small islands, just off the west coast of Peru, and now “farmed” by the Peruvian government. In this country there are no true guano beds, except a few accumulations of bat guano in certain caves of Kentucky and Texas, but these are not large enough to become of commercial importance.
[Phosphate Rock]
Phosphate rock is one composed chiefly of calcium phosphate along with various impurities, such as clay and lime. It occurs in beds, irregular masses, or as concretionary nodules in limestone or sand.
The bedded varieties are in the older sedimentary rocks, in which the phosphate runs from a small percentage up to as high as 85%. Ultimately the phosphate came from either animal excrement, or from bacterial decomposition of animal carcasses and bones. In all the beds it seems to be true that in the first instance the phosphate was laid down as a disseminated deposit in marine beds, usually limestones. Later by the action of water leaching through the rocks, the phosphate was dissolved, and then redeposited elsewhere in a more concentrated form. This may be either in the underlying sandstones, but is more often in limestones, replacing the original lime.
In these secondary deposits, if the phosphate has been laid down in cavities, the resulting phosphate will be in nodular masses. In the case of the Florida and Carolina deposits, these nodules have been freed from their matrix and washed along the river beds, remaining as pebbles in the river sands. The bed deposits are mostly in Kentucky and Idaho. The commercial use for such phosphate rocks is of course the making of fertilizers.
[Diatomaceous Earth]
[Pl. 62]
Diatoms are tiny single-celled plants living in uncounted millions in the fresh and salt water. Each diatom builds around itself two shells which fit into each other like the cover and box of a pill-box, and each shell is marvelously ornamented. The shells are composed of silica of the opal type. In size the diatoms range from ¹/₅₀₀₀ of an inch in diameter up to the size of a pin head, and they live in such numbers that ordinary surface waters have hundreds of them to the quart, and where they are flourishing up to 250,000 in a quart. When the plants die, or in order to reproduce abandon the shells, these shells fall to the bottom of the pond or the sea, and there accumulate, often making a layer from a few inches thick up to hundreds of feet in extreme cases. If unconsolidated, this mass of tiny shells is known as diatomaceous earth; but if they are consolidated it is called tripolite, so named because the first of them used commercially came from Tripoli.
As the shells are tiny and uniform in size and have a hardness of 6, the diatomaceous earth is used to make a great variety of polishes, scouring soaps, tooth paste, as a filler in certain kinds of paper, in making waterglass, as an absorbent for nitroglycerine, and as packing in insulating compounds, where asbestos would otherwise be used.
Deposits of freshwater diatoms are found all over the United States, usually in thin layers of limited extent, especially in Massachusetts, New York, Michigan, etc. The marine deposits of diatoms are on a much larger scale, there being beds of diatoms in Anne Arundel, Calvert and Charles Counties, Md., up to 25 or 30 feet in thickness. In Santa Barbara County, Cal., there is one bed 2400 feet thick and another 4700 feet thick, beside many other smaller ones. The enormous former wealth of life indicated by these great deposits may be suggested, when it is remembered that it takes about 120,000,000 to make an ounce in weight. They reproduce on an average about once in five days, so that from a single diatom the offspring possible under favorable conditions would amount to over 16,000,000 in four months or over 60 tons in a year. Of such an order is the potential increase of animals or plants, no matter how small, if the rate of reproduction is high.