23 



taining fossils, forty-two feet of sand and gravel without fossils, one 

 foot of peat, and at the top of the section six feet of dune sand. The 

 species of shells in the beds, according to Verrill, 1 indicate a warmer 

 climate by 15 F. for the deposition of the lower bed than for that of 

 the upper; 70°-j$° F. for the lower and 55°-6o° F. for the upper — 

 one a warmer climate than now prevails, the other a colder. On 

 Martha's Vineyard almost all the superficial deposits are of Glacial 

 or Recent age, the pre-Glacial outcropping only at Gay Head and 

 Chilmark Cliffs. On the island of Nanshon, northwest of Martha's 

 Vineyard, almost all the surface formations are of such a nature as 

 to denote glacial action, if not in the deposition at least in the wear- 

 ing and rearranging of material already deposited during some pre- 

 ceding period. Shaler is disposed to consider "these sands more 

 nearly related to the deposits of the Glacial Age than to those of the 

 preceding series." 



RHODE ISLAND AND CONNECTICUT. 



Here and there along the shores of these two States, especially of 

 Rhode Island, have been found exposures of the Pleistocene forma- 

 tion, containing characteristic fossils. In the neighborhood of New 

 Haven, on Long Island Sound, the Pleistocene terrace from an eleva- 

 tion of about twenty feet slopes evenly toward the Sound. Not much 

 has been written on the extent of the Pleistocene in these two 

 States. 



NEW YORK. 



Staten Island, Long Island and Gardiner's Island bear in their sur- 

 face formations evidences of glacial action. The old terminal mo- 

 raine extends across Long Island. The sands and gravels of Gardi- 

 ner's Island, according to Sanderson Smith 2 , contain twenty-five 

 species of fossil forms, of which all but two now inhabit the waters 

 South of Cape Cod. They indicate that the climate under which they 

 lived was colder than that which now prevails on the same coast. In 

 all this region from New York to Maine, the Pleistocene deposits 

 are so intermingled with the drift and so covered by it that they have 

 not been worked out so satisfactorily as otherwise might have been 

 the case. 



1 "On the Post- Pliocene Fossils of Sankoty Head, Nantucket Island" (Am. 

 Jour. Sci., 3d ser., Vol. X, pp. 364-75). 



2 "Notice of a Post-Pliocene Deposit on Gardiner's Island, Suffolk County, 

 New York" (New York Lyceum Nat. Hist., Annals, Vol. VIII, pp. 149-151). 



