THE CAMP-MEETING CUTTING. 679 



DESCRIPTION OF THE SECTION. 



Tlie cutting enters the hill at the north end, near the station of tlie 

 camp-meeting- grounds, and deepens to 18 feet in the first ([uarter, at the 

 overhead bridge of the road to Hatfield. It soon rises to 24 feet and con- 

 tinues with this depth to the end. Exactly in the middle it is cut in two 

 by the naiTOW sand gulch of a brook which runs east to the Connecticut. 



The dnimlin. — (PI. XV, C F.) The central and the oldest member 

 of tlie series exposed here is a drumlin of the "lower till" — indeed, the 

 lowest till — which rises with easy slope just south of the overhead bridge 

 to a height of 18 feet, and continues about 300 feet before it dips, with the 

 same easy slope, below the level of the railroad. Excluding for the moment 

 an upper layer of 2 to 3^ feet, the whole mass is a stony clay of extreme 

 compactness, in which the steam shovel could make but little progress, and 

 which, six mouths after the work was done, still retained the marks of the 

 shovel teeth. Most of the pebbles were about or under 6 inches in diameter, 

 of well-marked glacial forms, and often scratched, mostly of black argillite 

 and mica-schist, which borders the valley from the middle of Whately 

 north. The mass, when freshly cut, wa-s of a dark-gray color, nearly 

 black, but with a faint shade of brown and green. It showed no trace of 

 stratification at first, but after months of weathering a rude horizontal 

 bedding made its apjjearance. Lines from 3 to G inches apart could in 

 places be traced for a distance across the mass, and the pebbles lay parallel 

 to these planes more often than in other directions. 



In the upper 2 or 3 feet of this mass, excepted above from the 

 foregoing description, occurred a great number of bowlders, up to 4 or 5 feet 

 on a side, almost entirely of the tonalite which skirts the valley from the 

 middle of Whately south past the section. This upper portion is not sepa- 

 rated by any line of demarcation from the portion below. Nor does the 

 stony clay in which tliese large bowlders are embedded present any dif- 

 ference in texture or color, whether one examines a fresh or a weathered 

 surface, when it is wet, dry, or frozen. This seems to me to represent the 

 portion of the ground moraine which was brought into its present position 

 toward the close of the activity of the main ice, when the ice which passed 

 over this spot was deflected into the valley from the west over the ledges of 



