THE LOST VOLCANOES OF CONNECTICUT. 221 



THE LOST VOLCANOES OF CONNECTICUT. 



By Pkof. WILLIAM MOEEIS DAVIS. 



SEVERAL years ago, while walking down the lower Connecti- 

 cut valley with a party of students, we chanced upon a curi- 

 ous ledge of rock surmounting a low ridge hy the road that runs 

 from Berlin to Meriden, about half-way between Hartford and 

 New Haven. A scramble up the slope through a bushy growth 

 of young trees led to the foot of the ledge— a thick bed of gray- 

 greenish rock, not in layers like limestone or sandstone, not crys- 

 talline like granite or gneiss, but of a loose, structureless texture, 

 here and there carrying roughly rounded blocks of a dense, dark 

 rock which we knew to be an old lava, from its resemblance to 

 the rocks ejected from modern volcanoes. Although a ledge of 

 this kind is not of ordinary occurrence, its features were so well 

 marked that there could be little doubt of its nature and origin ; 

 it was a bed of volcanic ashes, interspersed with blocks or bombs 

 of lava that must have been thrown from some neighboring vent 

 long ago in the ancient time when the rocks of the valley were 

 made. The ash-bed lay upon a series of muddy sandstones that 



Fig. 1. 



had evidently been formed under water, for they were deposited 

 in layers, just as sand and mud are now when they are washed 

 into a pond ; and to all appearances the eruption of the ashes and 

 bombs had taken place during the accumulation of the sandstones. 

 The ashes had fallen into the water and settled down gently on 

 the soft, sandy mud at the bottom ; one of the dense lava blocks 

 was seen to have indented itself in the sandy layers, bending them 

 down on either side of it, just as if it had been an early product of 



