62 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



Ages passed on, and these animals lived undisturbed, basking 

 tliemsclves in the sun that shone upon no human being, cropping 

 the herbage of the shore, or seizing the fish of the estuary ; but 

 tliough no one was there to rule them, no one to name, describe 

 and classify them, they left a record of themselves in their tracks 

 which has been better preserved than will be the books of Audu- 

 bon or Cuvier. 



There was another epoch — when the gravel and sand, and 

 mud, which had filled the deep cavity, and between the layers 

 of which these animals had left their tracks, and some of them 

 tlieir bones, had become changed to rock, then again the pent 

 up fires biirst the shell about them — new rock and all, for 

 seventy miles all along the valley, and through the crevices, 

 oozed the red semi-fluid lava, cooling as it arose, till it produced 

 Norwattuck, and Holyoke,»and Tom, and their train of lesser 

 notables, extending on to West Rock, New Haven. None but 

 brute animals were there to witness the eruption, and possibly 

 they did not survive the catastrophe, for the force that rent the 

 solid earth for seventy miles, produced a destructive quaking 

 far and near. All over the valley, the new rocks which were 

 before in a horizontal position, were thrown into hills and hol- 

 lows. In some places, at least, the valley sunk, leaving the 

 fragments of the younger rock which jutted against the older 

 hills, high up on their sides, in the place where they were 

 deposited. This deposited rock is called sandstone, and under- 

 lies all your farms in the valley, from the range on the east to 

 tlie older range on the west. 



There was another day. Not a day of fire, as heretofore, but 

 a day of floods, of cold, of ice, of death. From the north pole 

 to South Carolina, there extended one enormous mass of ice. 

 It was five thousand feet thick, filling every valley, and riding 

 above every mountain top. Mount Washington alone lifted his 

 naked head above the frozen surface — a lonely isle in the great 

 ice ocean. And there rested that mass of ice, like a chill death- 

 moth, over all these fair lands. Life was extinct ; no tree or 

 shrub, no fish, or fowl, could bloom, or swim, or fly — all were 

 dead. 



This sea of ice, sensitive to the varying heat of the sun, 

 expanded and contracted, and with its motion and enormous 

 weight, pulverized the subjacent stone and rocks, broke oif cliffs 



