50 



HISTORY OF C OH ASSET. 



had been mixed * in the ice. This dirt was left by the 

 melting ice, much as it is left upon hummocks of snow 

 nowadays at the edge of the sidewalk when the clean 

 snow has all been melted off. 



On the coast of Alaska, upon the top of the Malaspinat 

 glacier, the soil is so deep that huge trees grow upon it. 

 No casual observer would suspect that hundreds of feet of 

 solid ice lie beneath. 



The sand and gravel which covered the patches of ice 

 in the meadows of Cohasset played an important part in 

 our history. It hindered the melting of the ice until 

 the freshets of many years had heaped it and spread it as 

 we now see it. 



For example, Little Harbor was all covered by a great 

 irregular fragment of ice one hundred feet or more in 

 thickness, so that the broad swift stream of water from 

 the melting glacier farther inland heaped up against the 

 western side of it that great bank which we now call 

 the Ridges. The contemptible stream which has been 

 dignified by the name of James River (properly James 

 Brook) was immensely larger in the days of the dying 

 glacier ; for the freshets of early summer were augmented 

 by the rains and snows of many scores of years, hitherto 

 kept in ice. This vigorous stream washed its way among 

 the masses of ice, carrying small stones and gravel and 

 sand into eddies or angles and bearing away the fine clay 

 into the sea. 



This same stream was probably the one that had 

 carved out Indian Pot years before when it flowed along 

 in the same general direction upon the top of the glacier. 



What is now North Main Street was a j^art of this 



* Professor Crosby explains how this dirt got mixed into the glacier. It came 

 originally in the bottom part of moving sheets of ice which were shoved up on top 

 of th(! main glacier before the latter had got started in its movement. (Article 

 upon Englacial Drift in Technology Quarterly, Vol. IX, Nos. 2 and 3, 1896.) 



t See Wright's Ice Age, p. 600, Report of Mr. I. C. Russell's trip to Mount St. 

 Ellas, 1890. 



