244 



CAPE COD GEOLOGY 



pothesis, as indeed they were if the theory of a single advance of the ice sheet 

 into the district were held. The constructive geological work on Cape Cod from 

 the time of Edward Hitchcock's conception of the modeling of the features of 

 the region by glaciation has verified his grasp of the subject, the chief gain 

 consisting in the recognition of a succession of ice advances, between which 

 clay and other deposits that are not strictly glacial have been laid down. 



In 1856 x Hitchcock referred the high terraces of Truro to his group of 

 "moraine terraces," which he regarded as having been heaped up and scooped 

 out by a glacier. 



In 1871, Charles H. Hitchcock compiled the data for a revised geological 

 map of Massachusetts, on which Cape Cod, although properly described in the 

 accompanying text as wholly composed of drift, was through some error in 

 printing, colored and indicated in the legend as Miocene Tertiary. 2 



In 1878 Mr. Warren Upham 3 published the results of a rapid reconnaissance 

 of the glacial deposits of Cape Cod and the neighboring islands, confirming 

 the view of Clarence King 4 that the terminal moraine of an ice sheet lay in 

 this region. 



In 1881 Shaler, 5 writing when the glacial drift was still thought to have 

 been deposited during a single ice invasion, estimated the amount of material 

 in the terminal moraine on the islands and in the drift on Cape Cod. 



The correlation and explanation of the moraines of Cape Cod and the 

 neighboring islands on the south was finally made in the masterful generalization 

 of the superficial glacial deposits of the northern states by T. C. Chamberlin 6 

 in 1883. In this paper the author developed the theory of glacial lobes with 

 lobate and interlobate frontal moraines, which completed the explanation sug- 

 gested by Edward Hitchcock as early as 1841 for the thick deposit of drift that 

 extends northward from the lobate moraines on the south side of Cape Cod 

 into the region about Manomet Hill and the Plymouth woods. This deposit 

 was laid down between an ice lobe west of the Cape Cod region and one in 

 Cape Cod Bay, and a similar deposit formed the forearm of the Cape north 

 of Nauset inlet. 



1 Edward Hitchcock, Illustrations of surface geology, Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 

 Washington, April, 1857, p. 33. 



2 H. F. Walling and O. W. Gray, Official topographic atlas of Massachusetts, Boston, 1871. Map 

 on pages 18-19, see note on p. 22. 



3 Warren Upham, in C. H. Hitchcock, Geology of New Hampshire, Concord, 1878, 3, pt. 3, pp 300- 

 303. 



4 Clarence King, See G. F. Wright, Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 19, 1876, pp. 60-63. 



5 N. S. Shaler, in Shaler and Davis, W. M., Illustrations of the Earth's Surface, Glaciers. Boston 

 1881, pp. 57-58. 



6 Preliminary paper on the terminal moraine of the second glacial epoch, Third Ann. Rept. of the 

 Director, U. S. Geol. Sur., 1881-82, Washington, 1883, pp. 291-402. 



