104 J. D. Dana on the origin of some of the 



Through this elevation of the Terrace era over New England and the 

 continent, by which rivers, lakes, and seashores were every where 

 bordered by terraces, millions of square miles of land were raised 

 from the condition of low flood-grounds to that of elevated plains, 

 fitted for fields, dwellings, and cities, for which purpose they were 

 afterward to be used. The New Haven plain was thus made ready 

 to become to man a means of happiness and improvement, and also a 

 source of gratitude for so goodly a dwelling place, although its larger 

 river is the Quinnipiac and not the Connecticut.* 



3. Life of the Terrace or Recent Era. — Of the wild animals which 

 once inhabited the region in this Terrace era, only a single relic has 

 yet been found. A stick cut by a beaver, from the Beaver Pond 

 Meadows, was formerly in the possession of Eli W. Blake, Esq., but 

 it is now lost. 



Aboriginal man has left his heaps of shells at various points along 

 the coast. There is a layer of them beneath the txirf, on the shore of 

 the bay between Halleck's place and Oyster Point. Others occur at 

 intervals in a similar situation at the top of the terrace bordering 

 West River above Oyster Point, as far as the cut made for the New 

 York railroad ; in West Haven, along the terrace near the mouth of 

 West River ; also, on and near the bay south of the mouth of West 

 River, where the fields for a considerable distance from the shore are 

 underlaid by them, so that the surface is thickly sprinkled with frag- 

 ments of shells after ploughing ; on Grape Vine Point ; at the top of 

 the high terrace on the west side of the Quinnipiac north and south 

 of Fair Haven ; also on the east of the Quinnipiac at various points, 

 one of them at the corner of Church and Prospect streets in Fair 

 Haven, just east of the Episcopal church, where a bed of this kind 

 was laid open in digging a cellar for the house recently built on the 

 spot. 



The shells are either those of oysters, or the round-clam, and not of 

 the long clam. Below Halleck's, and on Grape Vine Point, they are 

 mostly of the round-clam ; and at one place in the former region, many 

 of the shells appear to have been burnt, and occur with fragments of 

 charcoal. On the east side of West River, near the New York rail- 

 road, and on the west side along the terrace at its mouth, and also 

 just south of the West Haven ship yard, oyster shells are most abun- 



* See page 47. Saybrook has the mouth of the Connecticut river to which New 

 Haven had a Triassic title ; and New Haven has Yale College which Saybrook lost, after 

 16 years of possession from its foundation. If New Haven bay were now the mouth of 

 the Connecticut, the site of tlie New Haven plain would be part of the bottom of the bay. 



