310 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



The Tertiary formations of the State he divided into two general 

 groups, the most recent being made to include 1 the beds of blue plastic 

 clay alternating with layers of white siliceous sand, and the second 

 division the plastic clays of ( iayhead and Nantucket. 



Naturally the drift so abundantly distributed over the surface was 

 attributed to the action of the Noachian deluge. ''That seen about 

 Cape Ann can not fail to impress every reasoning mind with the con- 

 viction that a deluge of tremendous power must have swept over this 

 cape. Nothing but a substratum of syenite could have stood before its 

 devastating energy." 



One of the points which must impress the reader who is at all con- 

 versant with the work of modern physiographers is the inability of 

 Hitchcock, as well as his contemporaries, to understand the relation- 

 ship existing between a river and the channel in which it flowed. Dis- 

 cussing the course of the Connecticut River, he wrote: "The ordinary 

 laws of physical geography seem here to be set at defiance," and " the 

 geologist will be surprised to find it crossing the greenstone ridge " at 

 its highest part, i. e., through the gorge between Mounts Holyoke 

 and Tom. The facts that he deduced from this and other like illustra- 

 tions are that "surely the Connecticut River did not excavate its own 

 bed, but the gorges through which it and the Deerfield and Westtield 

 pass were excavated to a considerable depth before they began to tlow. v 



The student of to-day need scarcely be reminded that the river did 

 excavate its own channel and ran in essentially its present position 

 before the warping which brought the trap ridge across its course took 

 place. 



Hitchcock was not a believer in the doctrine of uniformitarianism; 

 indeed, while perhaps not an extreme catastrophist, he combated 

 vigorously the views put forth b} 7 Lyell in his Principles," and argued 

 for the greater intensity of geological agencies in the earlier periods 

 of the earth's history. Some of his reasons for this belief are worthy 

 of attention. He believed the continent to have been elevated above 

 the ocean, not little by little, but by a few paroxysmal efforts of vol- 

 canic force. Since this force, as acting during the past four thousand 

 years, seemed too feeble to result in the elevation of a single mountain 

 chain, so, he argued, it must have been more energetic in previous 

 epochs. 



The fact that the older rocks are more distorted and highly meta- 

 morphosed than the younger was also regarded as indicative of the 

 greater intensity of the earlier productive agencies. Singularly 

 enough, the near-shore origin of beds of conglomerate was not real- 

 ized, the occasional occurrence of such among sedimentary rocks 

 being regarded as due to the "occasional recurrence of powerful 



"The fir.st edition of this celebrated work appeared in 1830. 



