212 THE PHENOMENA OF DRIFT, OR 



ground, but its top is smoothed and striated throughout; and on 

 its southeast side, the strata were found so much fractured, that it 

 required only a crowbar to remove them to the depth of ten or 

 twelve feet ; and they have been taken away. * 



11. Organic Remains in Drift. 



This concluding head of the first part of this subject, will re- 

 quire but a few words. For it is one of the striking peculiarities 

 of our drift, that it is almost destitute of animal or vegetable re- 

 mains. Mr. Cooper has, indeed, made it probable, nay almost 

 certain, that the remains of the large mammifers at the Big Bone 

 Lick in Kentucky, are in di'ift. Indeed, it is highly probable that 

 a large part of such remains, which have been found in the 

 country, belong to the drift ; so that we may regard it as contain- 

 ing the elephant, mastodon, megatherium, megalonyx, and Cervus 

 Americanus. In the deposits of clay, above the common drift, 

 in Canada, and beneath the drift in the north part of New York, 

 a few shells of a highly arctic character have been found. It is 

 stated, also, in the reports of the New York Geological Survey, 

 that a plant has been found in a similar clay at Albany. It is 

 certainly a remarkable fact, that although the beds of clay and 

 sand connected with drift are more frequently excavated than any 

 other rock formation in our country, there should have been dis- 

 covered in them only the few organic relics above named. We 



* It is gratifying to find that cases similar to those described in the text, are beginning 

 to attract the attention of European geologists. The following description by Mr. Darwin, 

 in his paper in the New Ed. Phil. Journal for Oct. 1S42, on the Aiwient Glaciers of 

 Caernarvonshire, of a ledge of fractured slate in that country, corresponds very closely to 

 the case in Guilford. " A little way down the hill," says he, " a bed two or three feet 

 in thickness, of broken fragments of slate mixed with a few imperfectly rounded peb- 

 bles and bowlders, of many kinds of rock, is seen in several places to rest on the slate, the 

 upper surface of which, to the depth of several feet, has been disintegrated, shattered, 

 and contorted in a very curious manner. The laminated fragments, however, sometimes 

 partially retain their original position" — p. 35S. " May we not conjecture that the ice- 

 bergs, grating over the surface, and being lifted up and down by the tides, shattered and 

 pounded the soft slate rocks, in the same manner as they appear to have contorted the 

 sedimentary beds of the east coast of England (as shown by Mr. Lyell) and of Terra 

 del Fuego?" — p. 359. 



