384 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



side of Isle au Haut hill — ^whicli is five hundred feet above the 

 sea — and on the southern brow of Meg-unticook, overlooking a 

 precipice two or three hundred feet, and twelve hundred feet above 

 Camden harbor. Mount Battie, south of that mountain, the near- 

 est the village of any of those hills, and composed of your quart- 

 zose conglomerate, is everywhere scored and scratched, and has 

 a very abrupt southern face. Vast masses of rock have been torn 

 from it in this direction, and lie around its base. One large 

 boulder here about forty feet long, must weigh not less than six 

 hundred tons. 



There is a series of ten^aces in Yinalhaven as you remember, 

 seven hundred yards long, rising one above another, the last wall 

 of which forms the highest margin of a dell running nearly due 

 north-south unbroken for four hundred yards, and from twenty to 

 thirty feet deep, and fifty yards wide. This is a trough cut out of 

 the solid granite — a gigantic and splendid specimen of Nature's 

 sculpturing with her rude stone chisels — all she needed in those 

 days, when she had a vast duration before her to prepare a barren 

 country with fruitful soils for the expectant worker, man. Towards 

 the northern extremity of this rim, which is one hundred and fifty 

 feet above the sea, there stands a high rock overlooking the vil- 

 lage, apparently in its native bed, presenting a vertical wall 

 towards the south twenty feet high above the soil, and twenty-four 

 broad. No blasting bj' art, however carefully conducted, could 

 perform a better operation. If this rock be a boulder, as you and 

 I doubted, it must weigh upwards of a thousand tons. But many 

 thousand tons from the south of it are utterly removed. Going a 

 little further north, we reach one of the highest hills in the town, 

 of granite, two hundred and fifty feet. To the north we look away 

 down upon a tide " river," now a mile long, but once three, before 

 the land obtained its present height ; and earlier still, very much 

 longer. Looking around towards the east and south, we have 

 glanced over a spacious salt meadow, a densely wooded valley, and 

 a large salt water pond. This depression must have been cut out 

 of a comparatively level crust. From incessant examination of the 

 subject during the last few years, I have seen nothing to induce 

 me to believe that the granite had been materially changed from a 

 horizontal position before the boulder period, as those north-south 

 depressions might suggest. But what was really the depth of the 

 denudation, one can only vaguely conjecture ; but I have no doubt 

 but that it has been many hundred feet. 



