166 VLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY-15TH ANNUAL REPORT

and Wauchula. This material is desirable for sand-clay road metal. No clays suited for burned products are known in the county.

 HERNANDO COUNTY
 Hernando County is situated on the Gulf coast in west-central Florida and is underlain by the Ocala and Tampa formations. The Tampa formation occupies the southeastern part of the county and several outliers scattered northward throughout the region of the Ocala formation. Brooksville, the county seat, is located in the center of one of these outliers, having a radius of about six miles.
 Residual clays are of common occurrence in both the Ocala and Tampa limestones, but sedimentary clays occur only in the Tampa formation.
 The Ocala residual clays are usually sandy, contain numerous flint concretions and the deposits are very irregular in thickness and extent. Pockets of such clay are frequently encountered in mining the hardrock phosphate which occurs extensively in this region. These clay pockets are of insufficient size to warrant the separation of the clay from the other materials.
 The Tampa formation clays are worked at Brooksville and are found at numerous other localities in that vicinity. Few of them are desirable for burned products as their working qualities are rather poor. They are subject to excessive cracking during drying and burning which would result in severe losses during the process of manufacture. The transverse strength is relatively low in all of them.
 The Morris and Blumer Brick Company, located about one mile south of Brooksville, works one of these Tampa formation residual clays. The deposit consists of two parts, an upper two feet, which is dark-brown in color and somewhat sandy, and a lower member, which is very light in color and averages about eight feet in thickness. The deposit is underlain by the Tampa limestone and is separated from it by an irregular contact. Flint and limestone concretions occur in the clay. The contact between the two members of this deposit is fairly distinct and probably represents a former water table. This deposit underlies an extensive area south and west of Brooksville.
 At this plant the dark upper clay and the lower white one are mixed in equal proportions. The sand in the upper clay somewhat reduces the shrinkage of the mixture. These clays can be dried only with difficulty.