40 



HISTORY OF COHASSET. 



were pushed out of their bed in Boston Harbor and 

 jammed into a Cohasset hill. 



In several other hills or drumlins like the one men- 

 tioned, which lie south of Boston Harbor, similar shells 

 have been found, while in none of the drumlins north of 

 Boston do they occur, — evidences unimpeachable of the 

 glacier's violence. When these drumlins were deposited 

 by the moving ice the under surface of the glacier must 

 have been less cold than when it first froze into the soil 

 and carried it away, else the drumlins themselves would 

 have been frozen stiff and shoved into the sea. 



Indeed the very rock flour that made up these hills must 

 have been collected by streams of running water beneath 

 the ice, where stones grinding upon stones made the flour, 

 but could not heap it into such clean masses of clay as our 

 present hardpan hills. In living glaciers nowadays sub- 

 glacial streams are seen issuing from beneath the ice, 

 murky white with rock flour, which they have washed out 

 of the coarser grist under the glacier and are depositing in 

 basins by millions of tons. 



Some of these particles have traveled in the dark sub- 

 glacial channels for many miles. It is probable that in 

 our own hills there are many particles from the White 

 Mountains. 



On the hill where the almshouse stands, called Scituate 

 Hill by the early Hinghamites because it lay on the trail 

 towards Scituate, but now renamed Town Hill, a well was 

 dug in the barnyard some fifteen years ago ; here, at the 

 depth of about twelve feet, the men found a streak of blue- 

 black dock mud, about as thick as a hand, with some 

 small spiral shells or whelks in it broken into bits. The 

 same kind of hardpan is beneath as that above, and it is 

 possible that this hill was half made when a period of 

 warmer weather left time for mud to accumulate in Boston 

 Bay again with its shells ; and then the glacier froze into that 

 layer of mud and pushed it along as a bottom crust. It is 



