30 HISTORY OF COHASSET. 



Little Harbor and the Cove, are the effects of something 

 more than erosion ; the jolting of the adjacent masses of 

 granite up or down until the stable equilibrium could be 

 reached has given us much of our present topography of 

 rock. 



This faulting, furthermore, accounts for our finding 

 masses of diorite in some places to-day upon the same 

 level with some batches of the second granite, notwith- 

 standing the fact that this granite was originally many 

 feet beneath every atom of diorite. 



The down-drops and the upthrusts have been ended for 

 many thousands of years, and the rock bottom now 

 spreads stiff and hard and immovable, except as it is 

 settling in company with the whole New England coast. 



But the frost is still cracking the ledges where they 

 protrude ; the rain and the pelting sunbeams are loosening 

 the particles of rock ; the gases of the atmosphere are 

 corroding the surface of the town everywhere ; yet the 

 lives of men are so very brief that all these events are 

 imperceptible in any generation. 



Nevertheless it is just these slow changes that have 

 amounted to such a prodigious romance of the rock dur- 

 ing the millions upon millions of years since the Cohasset- 

 foundation commenced its formation. 



