642 GEOLOGY OF OLD HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, MASS. 



westward along the north foot of the Holyoke range, still as a bench cut in 

 the irregular sands which are heaped so high along its flanks. 



SHORE NOTCHES IN THE SIDES OF DKUMLINS. 



Along its western side the East Street basin is bounded by a continuous 

 line of drumlins, and the high terrace is marked by a horizontal fluting cut 

 in these drift hills. As all the hills south of Amherst village stood as 

 islands in the lake, while narrow channels connected the East Street basin 

 with the rest of the lake to the west, this fluting surrounds them on all 

 sides, and the same was true of the great block of hills north of the village 

 until, by the extension of the delta of Mill River, or Cushmans Brook, it 

 was joined to the mainland and made a peninsula. 



This horizontal fluting is well shown in the drumlin which rises north 

 of the Methodist Church in Amherst. Starting from the top of the hill, • 

 one follows down on either side its regular curved slope for a distance, 

 when it suddenly grows much steeper, and then, at the 300-foot contour, 

 begins a much easier slope. One comes down to this contour line on till, 

 but here begins a shore gravel bed, at first thin, but thickening outward, as 

 its sui-face has a lesser slope than the old surface of the drumlin upon 

 which it rests. 



So long as this East Street basin was open to the north, the water 

 moved through here with considerable velocitv in flood time and swept 

 such material as it could erode from the drift hills themselves southward 

 along their slopes (there were no brooks in these isolated hills to bring 

 down material and build up deltas), and so the bench along this side is 

 scantily represented by sloping sheets of gravel concentrated from the till. 



Just north of the New London Northei'n Railroad station, for several 

 hundred feet west of and above the railroad, the bench widens into a con- 

 siderable sand plain, recentljr built over. The sands dip south in great 

 sheets, which were pushed over the south front of a deltalike bar and carried 

 south through the notch in which the railroad runs. 



Across the village of Amherst the waters of the two basins were con- 

 tinuous. Farther south the fluting is carried along College Hill jjelow the 

 church and the gymnasium. It surrounds the long isolated drumlin south- 

 east of College Hill, and the section tlii-ough the south end of this hill made 

 by the Central Railroad showed that a great hooked bar of gravel was 



