404 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, t904, 



nature, identical with that of the ridge from whence they start. That 

 such a dispersion of bowlders from a single point should have taken 

 place regardless of contours is certainly enough to excite the interest 

 of .anyone. It is the means invoked by the two workers which have 

 excited our wonder, however. 



After exhibiting to their own satisfaction the inadequacy of either 

 the iceberg or the glacial hypothesis to account for their production, 

 the authors, in a paper before the Boston Society of Natural History 

 in 1848, attempted to show how all the phenomena might be explained 

 by the theory of a sudden discharge of a portion of the Arctic Ocean 

 southward across the land. The}^ discussed the important functions 

 of the "wave of translation," showed its surpassing velocity and great 

 propulsive power, and traced the influence of vehement earthquakes 

 near the pole in dislodging the northern waters and ice and maintain- 

 ing in the rushing Hood these vast and potent waves. They then sug- 

 gested that, at a certain stage of the inundation, the ice, previously 

 floating free, might impinge with irresistible violence against the tops 

 of submerged hills, and that the Canaan Mountain stood precisely in 

 the position to take the brunt of the ice-driving flood as it swept down 

 the long, high slope of the distant Adirondack and across the low, 

 broad valley of the Hudson. 



They then proceeded to show that, at the instant when some enor- 

 mous ice island struck the crest of the mountain and scooped the 

 trench which we there behold, a great vortex was produced by the 

 obstruction thus suddenly thrown in the path of the current, which, 

 endowed with an excessive gyratory or spiral velocity, was capable of 

 sustaining and carrying forward the greater part of the fragments. 

 As in the instance of the water spout and the whirlwind, the whirl- 

 pool would gather into the rotating column the projected blocks and 

 strew them in a narrow path in the line along which its pendent apex 

 would drag the ground. 



The paper terminated with an application of this idea in detail, to 

 the explanation of each important feature of these trains; to their 

 deflection from a straight line; the intermission in the bowlders at cer- 

 tain places in the train, and the fact that some of the blocks have been 

 violently broken at the moment previous to their final deposition/' 



Truly there were catastrophists in those days. 



We may anticipate here by stating that at the meeting of the Ameri- 

 can Association for the Advancement of Science in 1870, Prof. J. B. 



«In 1852 the English geologist Lyell visited this region in company with James 

 Hall, the former's views on the subject being published in 1855 in the Proceedings 

 of the Royal Institution. He regarded the hypothesis of glacial transportation as out 

 of the question, and apparently also that put forward by the Rogers brothers, for he 

 made no mention of it. His own idea was that the large erratics had been trans- 

 ported to their present resting place by floating coast ice. 



