THE FRIENDLY ROCKS 



How one would like to know the history of this 

 conglomerate that caps the higher Catskills ! What 

 stone-crusher reduced the quartz rock and sorted 

 the fragments so evenly? The stone-crushing plant 

 that turned out the material for most of the other 

 rocks ground "exceeding fine," but in this instance 

 they turned out a very coarse product, though a 

 very uniform one. On the shores of some Palaeozoic 

 sea have these pebbles been rolled and worn. Only 

 upon one sea-beach have I seen pebbles of this size 

 in lieu of sand, and that was upon Dover beach, on 

 the coast of England. Instead of the hissing of the 

 sands when the breakers come in, there rises the 

 sound of the multitudinous rattling of these myr- 

 iads of pebbles. Some old Devonian seashore has 

 sent up a like sound where these Catskill pebbles 

 were washed by the waves. 



The rock-crushing plants must have been very 

 busy in the early geologic ages, and quartz rock 

 must have been a drug in the market. We see no 

 natural forces at work now reducing rocks to coarse 

 gravel on any scale comparable to that which must 

 have taken place in Silurian times when the Shaw- 

 angunk rocks and the Oneida conglomerate were 

 laid down. In any case, where were the quartz 

 mountains from which they came, and where were 

 the forces that ground them up? "From lands to 

 the eastward," geologists think, but of such lands 

 there are no traces now. 



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