The Ash Bed at Meriden and its 

 Structural Relations. 



By William Morris Davis. 



During a geological excursion in the Easter recess of 1887, with 

 several students from Harvard College, we were walking down the 

 Berlin road towards Meriden one afternoon, when our attention 

 was taken by the peculiar appearance of a bold outcrop that made 

 part of the trap ridge anterior to Lamentation Mountain. We had 

 already examined the ridge a mile farther north, where it consisted 

 of trap of the ordinary kind, and also at an intermediate point, 

 where, as was long ago described by Percival in his State Report, 

 the dense trap is for a distance of several hundred feet replaced by 

 a conglomerate of more or less water-worn trap fragments, in which 

 are intercalated thin beds of sandstone giving a clear idea of the dip 

 of the whole deposit But the part of the bluff now reached looked 

 like neither of the other outcrops, and we made our way up to it 

 through the underbrush. A closer inspection showed it to consist 

 of a gray, greenish mass of vague texture, much weathered on the 

 surface, through which were scattered great rounded blocks of dense 

 trap, very fine grained at the surface, and of all sizes from six inches 

 up to several feet in diameter. It could hardly be interpreted other- 

 wise than as an ash bed, into which blocks of lava had fallen during 

 the shower of ashes that had formed it. One of the first blocks to 

 fall indented the sandy mud on which the ash bed was accumulated. 



Similar ash beds are described by Scrope in his classic volume 

 on the Volcanoes of Central France, and are often mentioned in 

 accounts of recent volcanoes. Lava blocks of large size are 

 known to be thrown to considerable distances; Humboldt de- 

 scribes them and recent reports from Italy give the same story. 



