GEOLOGY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAIN DISTRICT. 12/ 



part consists of a fall of seven feet into an oval basin twenty-five feet 

 long and twenty wide. Then the stream makes two leaps of ten feet 

 each, one above the other, and finally terminates by a vertical plunge of 

 twenty-three feet, the body of the stream here being only ten feet wide. 

 Dr. Bemis narrates interesting expeditions to this locality, and found 

 trout in abundance considerably above these falls. His companions, — 

 among them the elder Crawford, — seemed to have great fears of the evil 

 spirits that kept guard over the source of this mountain torrent. 



Country East of the Peabody and Ellis Rivers. 



BY J. H. HUNTINGTON. 



Beans Purchase, Chatham, etc. The great area of country stretching 

 southward from the Androscoggin river in Shelburne is for miles a wil- 

 derness, uninhabited save by the denizens of the forests. It is broken 

 by hills and valleys, rocky cliffs and deep gorges, mountain ridges and 

 precipitous slopes ; while on the west side of Bean's Purchase, and on 

 the state line near Chatham, we have mountains that rise to the height 

 of nearly four thousand feet. In Chatham and Jackson the country is 

 hardly less broken. The gorge between Mts. Wildcat and Carter is quite 

 as remarkable as any among the mountains, especially in its southern 

 opening. The precipitous wall of rock on the west, the over-hanging cliffs 

 on the east, the great mass of debris across the valley that confines the 

 water of a small lake, are all of intense interest to the geologist. On the 

 east the Bricket notch, just over the border in Maine, is remarkable, par- 

 ticularly in the way in which the streams divide as they come down from 

 the side of the Notch. The stream from Mt. Royce, where it leaves the 

 steep slope of the mountain, divides ; a part runs north into the Andros- 

 coggin, and the rest flows south into the Saco. But what is most won- 

 derful, from Speckled mountain, on the south-east side of the Notch, 

 there is a stream the exact counterpart of the one from Mt. Royce ; — so 

 that the height of land in the Notch is an island by being surrounded by 

 water from these two streams, or rather four streams, after the two have 

 divided. At the head waters of the east branch of the Saco there is a 

 low notch towards Wild river, and the slopes of the sides are regular, 

 compared with most notches about the mountains. 



The irregularity of ridges and mountain ranges in this section is due 



