SCENERY ON THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. 499 



fertility to soils formed from it, and if similar nodules 

 occur in similar green sands of the tertiary epoch, the 

 origin of the green grains and the phosphate of lime 

 would appear to be simultaneous. Any chemical cause 

 that accounts for the formation of the characteristic green 

 sand, ought also to account for the presence, amongst it, 

 of those nodules of phosphate of lime. At least this point 

 thrusts itself forward as deserving of investigation. 



Amherst College was established in 1821. It is under 

 the management of the Trinitarian Congregationalists ; 

 has eight professors, four tutors, and 176 students. It is 

 a retired, quiet, and healthy place, and the students 

 expenses rarely exceed 150 dollars. At Yale, as I have 

 elsewhere stated, the expenses are one half more ; and at 

 Cambridge, nearly twice as much. 



March 27. Eeturning to Northampton by stage, we 

 ascended the Connecticut River by railway, twenty miles 

 farther to Greenfield, in the neighbourhood of which lie 

 the localities most fruitful in the fossil bird-tracks. This 

 upper part of the river presents many beautiful points of 

 view river reaches, wooded banks, and overhanging 

 hills and cliffs, which, in summer, must make the jour 

 ney by this line of railway very pleasant. But there is 

 abundant wilderness also, and flats still dotted over with 

 the unsightly blackened stumps of the lately burned 

 forest, which carried me back again in memory to all I 

 had seen in the rawer regions on the St John, the St 

 Lawrence, and their many tributaries. Here, after the 

 lapse of three centuries, the axe of the Saxon woodman 

 is still only beginning to make itself felt on the less pro 

 mising portions of the Connecticut valley its swampy 

 bottoms, and its gravelly slopes. 



I have already, more than once, described the surface 

 of Massachusetts as agriculturally poor one great cause, 

 no doubt, of its activity and progress in the other arts of 

 life. Still, of the whole area of the State, which com- 



