198 DRIFT DEPOSITS OF MANCHESTER 



that the chief part of the district around Man- 

 chester, before it was covered with Drift, consisted 

 of upper new red sandstone rock, with slight por- 

 tions of lower new red sandstone, magnesian marls, 

 and upper red marls, and the hard sandstone and 

 limestone rocks, and cold clays and shales of 

 the coal-fields of Manchester and Pendleton — all 

 deposits in their primeval state, capable of sup- 

 plying little nourishment to vegetation. 



It is to the period when the Drift was formed 

 that the greatest part of the soils of this and other 

 countries owe their formation, admixture, and 

 arrangement. Then it was that the earth, to use 

 an agricultural term, underwent the process of a 

 long fallow. During Professor Agassiz's Glacial 

 Epoch, intense frost and cold split and rent the 

 hardest rocks asunder, immense glaciers ploughed 

 up the sides of the mountains, huge icebergs, 

 freighted with countless varieties of stones, floated 

 on the waters, and torrents scattered and dispersed 

 the dehris over the plains. Rocks of all ages 

 were thus brought together for the purpose of 

 furnishing the various elements required by the 

 vegetable world. A period of wintry desolation 

 for a time existed, when this part of the earth's 

 surface, from the evidences left, must have been 



