GEOLOGY. 317 



materials frozen at the surface in winter. The depth of the well is about 

 thirty-four and a half feet, and it has about two and a half feet of water 

 in it. Its diameter is about three feet, and it is proper!}- stoned up with 

 rounded boulders of limestone, and has a curb around the top. A marble 

 slab, with a circular hole eighteen inches in diameter, covers the well, the 

 windlass being protected by a roof made of a couple of boards nailed 

 together. 



Immediately west of the well rises a hill of gravel and sand, which may 

 be thirty feet above the well, and at its south end some fifty to seventy feet 

 high. This ridge is an eighth of a mile long, and runs northeast and south- 

 west. Near its northern end it is crossed by a road which has been exca- 

 vated to a depth of sixty-two feet. At the top of the ridge the bed of clay 

 and the layers of sand and gravel are nearly horizontal, but lower down 

 they dip easterly fifteen or twenty degrees. At the foot of the hill they take 

 a horizontal position. The pebbles in the strata were about three inches in 

 diameter, and remarkably free from sand and gravel. The dip of those 

 beds of gravel, sand, and clay, make it almost certain that this ridge of 

 drift was formed by a current from the northeast. 



The well was stoned up late in the autumn, and during the winter ice 

 formed upon the Avater, in one night, two inches thick. It continued to 

 freeze till April, since which time no ice has formed on the surface; but 

 when visited June 25th, the stones of the well, for some four or five feet 

 above the water, were mostly loaded with ice, and the temperature of the 

 water was only one degree above freezing. July 14th, there was ice in the 

 well. The water at that time was twenty-two inches deep. About one hun- 

 dred rods distant is another well, the temperature of which, on the 25th of 

 June, was fifty -one. Another well, twelve feet deep, sixty rods distant, had 

 a temperature of forty-five. 



In this connection, Prof. Hitchcock entered at length upon similar phe- 

 nomena which had been observed in other places, of a well in Ware, 

 Mass., dug through gravel and sand, which froze last year, though not to 

 the extent of that at Brandon. There were other instances of frozen wells 

 on record, one in the thirty-sixth volume, first series, of the American 

 Journal of Science. This well is in Owego, N. Y. In this, the flame of a 

 candle was deflected, indicating a current of air passing through the gravel 

 strata. The well was on the table-land of the Susquehanna, about thirty 

 feet above the river. There was also an account of an ice-mountain in Vir- 

 ginia, which was satisfactorily explained as being a natural refrigerator, 

 the cold of the winter being retained through summer on account of a 

 variety of causes. Sir Roderick Murchison has mentioned a similar moun- 

 tain in Siberia. 



Prof. Hitchcock said, that before giving a probable theory of the phenom- 

 ena at Brandon, he would present a few preliminary propositions. 



1. He regarded the cases at Ware and Owego as essentially like that at 

 Brandon, and to be explained in the same manner. 



2. The phenomena most probably have a connection with a gravelly and 

 sandy soil ; hence we should make the character of such soils an element in 

 our investigations. 



3. As the gravelly deposit is in such a soil, the idea is precluded that the 

 congelation is the result of chemical reagents. 



4. The temperature in the wells is strongly affected by the temperature 



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