NATURE STUDY. 



PUBI^ISHED UNDER THE AUSPICEvS OF THE 



Manchester Institute of Arts and Sciences. 



Vol. III. March, 1903. No. 10. 



Our Glacial Inheritance. 



BY WILLIAM H. HUSE. 



Our hills and vallej'S, our lakes and riv^ers, are nearly all, 

 directly or indirectly, the product of the scouring and 

 scraping that was done by the ice sheet millenniums ago. 

 There are some topics in geography that must be studied 

 from the textbooks alone or, at best, shown b}- pictures, 

 but in the northern states the work of the glacial period 

 can be studied anywhere. At the summit of Mt. Wash- 

 ington bowlders have been found, and the ledges on the 

 New England coast are polished and grooved, looking as 

 they did when their ice covering melted and disappeared. 



Gravel banks composed of till are common everywhere. 

 In the one shown in the frontispiece the line of demarca- 

 tion between the unstratified and stratified deposits is 

 easil}' seen. The lower portion is composed of till, the 

 hard gravel so valuable for roads. In fact, the bank is 

 being rapidly carted away for that purpose. The deposit 

 is so .solid that the marks of the pick-axes made several 

 days before the picture was taken were perfectly clear and 

 distinct. The stratified gravel above shows no such 



