448 ON AN ANCIENT IMPLEMENT OF WOOD. 



and dislodged, concealed and revealed, at the caprice of the stream. 

 Fences are elusive, trees are vagrant, the soil is erratic. The river has 

 a mortgage on every farm contiguous to itself, and when it purposes 

 foreclosure, resistance on the part of the occupant would cost him more 

 than the value of the land. Within the period of my remembrance, the 

 locality where the mallet was found lay several rods inland from the 

 river-bank. The intervening soil has gone. An island, nearly opposite, 

 of considerable size, and partly cultivated, was carried away by ice in a 

 single freshet. Meantime the opposite shore has advanced upon the 

 bed of the stream. In view of all this shifting, is not the question of 

 antiquity ruled out? Can we have assurance that this mallet has not 

 come, say from Vermont, long since that State was named? We can, 

 and by a plain inference. Everywhere along this portion of the river, 

 wherever bars and flats are deposited, wherever the fluvial forces are 

 constructive, the deposit is homogeneous — the same loamy sand, vary- 

 ing only in this, that in quick water, and at low levels, it is coarse 

 and nearly clean sand ; while in the gentlest currents, and at the high- 

 est levels, it is the finest loam. In this obvious manner all the erratic 

 soil is graded and shaded. The chief constituents are constantly the 

 same — sand and clay intimately mingled in ever- varying proportions. 

 This material the restless river is forever building up and cuttiDg down; 

 and anything modern, that could once have floated, is liable to be found 

 in it. But the mallet, and the forest growths, the age of which we are 

 considering, have cropped from a bed of clay, having definite outlines 

 and very limited extent; and the migratory loam is superimposed, and 

 has no share in the contents of the clay. The isolation of the clay is 

 the insuperable difficulty in the way of regarding it as a river-deposit ; 

 and it must be older than the loam, because the law of gravity forbids 

 the growth of such formations except from beneath upward. Clay is 

 assignable to the drift period, when glacial and diluvial forces crushed, 

 carried, and dropped the soil of the continent. Half a mile across the 

 lowlands, east from this clay-bed, in the hill-sides, is clay in place, hor- 

 izontally laminated, without mixture, perfectly free from organic re- 

 mains or mineral waifs. The clay in which the mallet was found is a 

 degraded clay, the wash and settle of higher clay in place. In it, the 

 mallet and the tree-growths have been mired and ingulfed. Probably 

 from the clay-hills which are now standing, or from others which have 

 disappeared, rivulets of rain, freighted with mud, and pushing toward 

 a place of drainage, have brought this clay hither. The river did not 

 bring it, but has since brought the loam, and covered the old formation 

 with the new. 



My inferences are : 



1st. That the isolation of the clay-bed is evidence that it is not a river- 

 deposit. 



I'd. That the products of vegetation, and other impurities contained 

 in the bed, indicate that it is not clay in place, but that this bed has 



