148 PROCEEDINGS OF WASHINGTON MEETING. 



of the drainage from the glaeial melting sank through the water to the bottom as 

 the ice gradually withdrew, and exhibits essentially the same characters as on 

 areas that were land, excepting its usually obscure traces of stratification and its 

 smoother surface. 



Remarks were made upon the paper by Robert Hay. 

 The following paper was read : 



EFFECTS OF DROUGHT AND WINDS ON ALLUVIAL DEPOSITS IN NEW ENGLAND. 



BY HOMER T. FULLER. 



For twenty years or more I have been watching with much interest some slow 

 changes of the surface of terrace formations in the valleys of New England rivers. 

 The large predominance of granites, gneisses, and crystalline schists in northern 

 Xew England east of the Green mountains has brought it about that the material 

 ground up and deposited in these river valleys, both by glacial and river agencies, 

 is chiefly quartz sand. On these terraces vegetation must have been very slow in 

 getting a foothold. First, creeping vines, like the strawberry or low running black- 

 berry or shrubs of diminutive size, may have advanced under the shade of larger 

 shrubs and trees which bordered the water-courses ami which gradually, too, climbed 

 the slopes and occupied the plateaus. At all events, we know that these terraces in 

 the valleys of the southwestern part of the territory mentioned were once covered 

 with a magnificent growth of pine and elm and chestnut : that in the central region, 

 even on these sandy soils, the maple and poplar and sometimes even the hemlock 

 and beech thrived, and that farther northward the spruce grew everywhere. Nov . 

 however, portions of these terraced slopes are becoming absolutely desert, as bare 

 of any vegetation as are the tracts of the African desert westward from the meadows 

 of the Nile. 



The object of this paper is to direct the attention of this Society first to the facts, 

 as illustrated specially by one or two localities which are typical, and secondly to 

 the causes as determined by long continued observation. 



As might be presumed, the tracts most affected are above the reach of river over- 

 flow and where glacial erosion must have provided the material which was in the 

 epochs following more finely pulverized and then separated by running streams. 

 One of the best illustrations is presented in the valley of the southern branch of 

 Sugar river, a tributary of the Connecticut, in the towns of Lempster, Goshen, and 

 Newport, Xew Hampshire. This valley is a section of what in the later Glacial and 

 early Champlain epochs must, if I mistake not, have been first a continuous stream 

 of ice and then a broad river from almost under the shadow of Moosilauke moun- 

 tain, in Grafton county, to near the Massachusetts border, if not, indeed, through 

 to Connecticut. The proof is found in the continuous valley that extends nearly 

 from north to south throughout this extent, and which lies west of Monadnock, the 

 Snnapee range and Kearsarge, in Wilmot, and east of Grantham and Croydon 

 mountains and the high hills of Unity, Lempster, Alstead, and Surry ; and, secondly, 

 in the height of terrace formations above and near the sources of the several streams 

 which now drain the various sections of this longitudinal depression. In Lempster, 

 for example, these terraces are twenty to forty feet above the sources of Cold river, 



