THE PELHAM EIVER SANDS. 589 



The excavations of the Central Raih-oad on either side of Dwight's 

 station and through the Belchertown notch gave me abundant opportunity 

 to study the anatomy of these sands, and especially the peculiarities of the 

 kettle-holes, and this material, with matter derived from other portions of 

 the valley, I have brought together in Chapter XIX, page 665. 



I have given the same color to all the kame-like sands (1) which stretch 

 southward at the foot of the eastern rim of the valley just above the high- 

 est normal terrace, (2) which extend along the north and west slope of the 

 Holyoke range, and (3) which rise in the central parts of the valley 

 above the level of the terrace flat. The first and most interesting series, to 

 which I have given for convenience of reference the name of the Pelliam 

 River, from the place where its remnants are best preserved, is continuously 

 traceable from North Amherst through the Belchertown notch, and from this 

 point great disconnected patches of entirely similar sands and gravels occur 

 at the foot of the eastern valley rim south across the State; and while one 

 can not assert that they were laid down exactly contemporaneously in the 

 bed of a single glacial river, the fact that they maintain just the same slope 

 as the high terrace makes that the most simple supposition. At all events, 

 their common origin — for they were all deposited between the ice and the 

 valley rim — is sufficiently probable to justify a common color for them all. 



The deposits of the Pelham River begin just south of North Amherst 

 and swing round east with the curvature of the rocky slope to the point 

 where the stream received the waters of the Leverett Lake (p. 584). The 

 Pelham Lake drained into this stream, breaching the last great terrace 

 which had stretched across the mouth of the basin, and the stream itself 

 wore deeply eastward into the soft material of this terrace, forming the 

 flat on which the Orient House stood (fig. 32, p. 578), and ran south from 

 here, bounded for a long way on the west by the gneiss ridge which 

 extends south from the west village of Pelham, and washed the side of 

 the mountain on the east to a height of 400 feet. It is a perfect water 

 course, which farther south lacks a western boundary, it having here rested 

 against the ice (b^°, PI. XXXV, C, D), and where it passes into Belchertown 

 a massive di'umlin forms its western rim, and it now ends in a great delta 

 thrust out into the depression in which Dwight's station lies. As one stands 

 on the eastern end of the Holyoke range and looks north, one sees this delta 

 resting against the mountain on the east and against the low dam of the 



