708 GEOLOGY OF OLD HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, MASS. 



were again well exposed in a fresh cutting, and here the clay is kneaded 

 into fantastic shapes, squeezed into holes in the drift below, and a large 

 mass of coarse, reddish drift has been dumped into it, and the two are in 

 places well molded together. Twenty feet farther on the clays were per- 

 fectly normal and horizontal. The intervening space was well exposed, and 

 one could see how the clay disentangled itself from the mass of coarse 

 material and gradually reassumed its horizontal lamination. Below and 

 above the disturbed portion the clays are quite horizontal and undisturbed. 



This locality is at the base of a promontory in the ancient lake, around 

 which the thread of the current bent as it swept southwestward over East- 

 harapton; and the ice floes from the north, stranding here, have plowed up 

 the clays and mingled them with the coarse material with which they were 

 themselves loaded. 



In the curve by which the current bent around the projecting drumlins 

 in Northampton several similar disturbed patches isolated in the otherwise 

 horizontal clays h?ve been exposed, as in the digging of the sewer at the 

 south end of King street, wliei'e they were so distorted that they were 

 mistaken for till by a good observer. They were described as iDeing thor- 

 oughly puddled. A mile farther northwest, at the great cut on the railroad 

 to Williamsburg extending from the Bay State Brook east to the crossroads 

 north of the railroad, the same thing is shown for many rods in the eastern 

 portion of the cutting-. The sands are irregularly disturbed, and at several 

 places disconnected pockets of bowlders and glacial clay appear, wholly 

 inclosed in the distorted sands. 



In the same area of disturbance a mile farther southwest, the fine 

 exposures in the great clay pits south of the Insane Asylum are illustra- 

 tions of the same action. A horizontal line is marked for many hundred 

 feet in the vertical walls of the excavations at the same level with the plane 

 of disturbance farther north. Above this line the clays are undisturbed and 

 about 12 feet thick before they merge into sand; below they are kneaded 

 into the most tortuous forms, and at times all trace of structure is gone. 

 As in the block above the watch seen in the accompanying plate (XIX), 

 traces of more than one passage of the ice are manifest, and in the largest of 

 the blocks shown in the figure the extreme convolution of the plastic layers 

 on the one side, and the faulting and incipient slaty cleavage on the other, 

 are well shown. The convoluted laver in the block to the right is com- 



