West Peak, and What It Saith. 



By Rev. J. T. Pettee. 



[West Peak is the name which we, Meridenites, give to the most westerly of 

 our •' Hanging Hills." It is. by Prof. Guyot's survey, 995 feet above the waters 

 of the Sound, and, though far from being the highest mountain in the State (Mt. 

 Brace in Saulsbury being 2225 feet high), i?, by considerable, the highest of the 

 trap dikes of the Connecticut Valley. Geologists are agreed, I believe, in thinking 

 that the valley, which stretches from Hartford to New Haven, was once an es- 

 tuary or arm of the sea, and Percival, the distinguished geologist of Connecticut, 

 was the first to show how, by the eruption of the trap across the valley in Meri- 

 den, the Connecticut River was made to change its course, and empty at Say- 

 brook instead of New Haven. By a poetic license which, I think, perfectly par- 

 donable, I have taken a part for the whole, and spoken of West Peak as being 

 formed under the ocean. 



That the trap was erupted under water seems to be the coneurrent opinion of 

 geologists from Lyell to Le Conte. Says Lyell (Elements of Geology, p. 115), 

 " The recent examiation of the igneous rocks of Sicily has proved that all the 

 more ordinary varieties of European trap have been there produced under the 

 waters of the sea." And Le Conte, in his admirable " Elements," p. 206, says 

 " Sometimes similar sheets (of trap) are found between the strata (of sandstone,) 

 2iS\{ outpoured on the sea-bottom, 2i.ndi z.^\.trwzYds co\ext6. with sediment." And 

 Dana everywhere speaks of the trap of the Connecticut valley as erupted through 

 the sandstone, which was, of course, formed under water. 



As Owen says that the ?nastodon ranged " throughout the tropical and tempe- 

 rate latitudes," and as its bones have been found (in this case associated with a 

 human skull,) as near as Worcester, Mass., on the east, and Cohoes and New- 

 burg, N. Y., on the west; and as Dr. Percival (Geological Report of Conn., p. 

 465,) says " a vertebra of a mammoth was found in New Britain," I think it no 

 stretch of the imagination to conceive of the mastodons as " roaming through 

 these lands;" especially in view of the thought that the mammoth spoken of by 

 Dr. Percival was probably a mastodon, the difference between the vertebrae of 

 these mammals being hardly distinguishable. 



The admirable article by Prof T. Stery Hunt, Mass- Inst. Tech., Boston, Fos- 

 sil Footprints, in the seventh Vol. of Appleton's American Cyclopaedia, is my au- 

 thoity for my prehistoric animals. " More recent studies of the fossil remains of 

 these animals, which have been carefully made by various naturalists, and espec- 

 ially by Cope, have made us acquainted with that curious class of animals, the 

 dinosaurs. These creatures constituted numerous genera and species, some of 

 gigantic size, others comparatively small ; some feeding on plants and others car- 



