THE TERRACES OF THE CONNECTICUT. 727 



the water to essentially its present volume becomes quite manifest. The 

 meadows are broad jjrairies of the richest soil, the gift of the river, and 

 seen from Mount Holyoke or Sugar Loaf when the crops are on, as they 

 are farmed without fencing, they spread in a carpet of wonderful beauty at 

 one's feet and take their place iu a landscape which owes much of its charm 

 to the immediate proximity of the prairie and the mountain. 



The plain that seems so perfectly level when seen from above proves 

 on closer inspection to be made up of a series of broad, low ridges (fig. 47), 

 like the long, low swell that comes in on the coast after a distant storm, and 

 the curved grooves which separate these ridges run approximately parallel 

 to the bank of the stream, but with greater or less curve. This is due to 

 the composite nature of the terrace itself, as explained in a general way 

 on page 722 and illustrated in its details in the discussion of incomplete 

 terraces on page 731. Each of these low bars represents one of the ele- 

 ments out of which the terrace is built, and has passed through the stages 

 of bar, island, and " glacis teiTace,"^ as it has added itself to the previously 

 formed plain, while the groove on the outside of each ridge (out from the 

 river) is the unfilled remnant of the waterway which separated the island 

 from the former shore. 



The surface of the broad terrace plain north of North Hadley and 

 extending up to Sunderland shows this most strikingly, and when seen 

 from the hill just north of Hatfield each separate island of which the ter- 

 race was built by the westward swing of the river can be picked out. 



THE STRUCTURE OF THE TERRACES. 



The river sands. — The two scarps which form the riverward limit of the 

 old lake bottom and the outer boundary of the terrace system on either side 

 of the river, and represent the outermost limits of the oscillations of the 

 stream, aftbrd the best natural sections of the lake-bottom beds and com- 

 monly expose at least the upper portion of the clays and their junction with 

 the sands above, a junction very often marked by a line of springs. Between 

 these scarps the river-bottom sands rest in the trough cut in the clays by 

 the river, and the stream rarely nins directly on the subjacent clays. These 

 sands are of medium grain, well \vashed, straticulate, with southward dip, 

 and often, in addition, cross bedded with shai-p southward or more moderate 



' Hitchcock, Surface Geology, 1860, p. 5. 



