141 
The subject of Surface Geology, involving, of course, the 
question of the Drift, early claimed his attention, for his 
Geology of the Connecticut was published in 1823, after it 
had appeared as an article in the very first volume of Silli- 
man’s Journal, one year previous to Eaton’s first report on — 
the Geology of the Erie Canal, and Olmsted’s first report of 
the Geological State Survey of North Carolina. At that 
time the only recognized agency to which the drift phenome- 
na could be ascribed, was that of moving waters. Deltas, 
terraces, drift boulders, and polished rock-surfaces were all 
explained in a vague and poetical way by diluvial floods. 
The grandeur of the phenomena was not appreciated, but 
their nature was. When, ten years afterwards, the brothers 
Rogers got the first true glimpse of Appalachian erosion in 
its immensity of breadth and height, the aqueous theory 
swelled to commensurate proportions, just as the ice theory 
has grown to suit the geographical development of the drift 
appearances. 
Had Dr. Hitchcock been more of a poet, and less of a 
Yankee, he would have adopted an hypothesis similar to 
that of the Rogerses, and been hampered by it all his life. 
But he soon detected traces of another agency, and although 
the absence of Alpine summits from New England, and the 
distance at which the northern icebergs melted from its 
coasts, deprived him of opportunities for coming to a lively 
consciousness of his suspicions, they prepared him to accept 
the first instructions on the subject which were sent to him 
from abroad. He always maintained that he got his first 
clear views of the joint action of ice and water from the 
researches of Sir James Hall, although Murchison, in his 
anniversary address before the London Geological Society 
in 1842, accords the honor of inventing the glacio-aqueous 
theory, as Hitchcock named it, to Peter Dobson, of Vernon, 
