734 GEOLOGY OF OLD HAMPSHrRE COUNTY, MASS. 



THE OXBOW8 OF THE COXIS^ECTICUT. 



lu the Montague Lake the valley was too narrow, the rock comes too 

 near the surface, and the earlier deposits were too thick to allow of broad 

 bends and cut-offs. Several old river beds there seem rather to have been 

 formed by the building up of an island in midstream and the after limita- 

 tion of the current to one side of it without filling up the abandoned portion. 



Over the Ijroad bottom of the Hadley Lake the stream had more free- 

 dom, and in the Hatfield and Northamjjton meadows are two most interest- 

 ing series, containing in one case four and in the other three old cut-off 

 oxbows, and between is the great Hadley bend, where the river runs about 

 6 miles to advance southward 1 mile, and threatens to take a straight course 

 down through Hadley street. (See map, PI. XXXV, in pocket.) 



In Hatfield the oldest oxbow runs down west of the village. A part 

 of the unfilled bed of the second is the Great Pond. The third is repre- 

 sented by a sickle-shaped pond east of the road going north from the A'illage, 

 and the completion of the fourth has in very recent years transferred a 

 fragment of Hadley to the west side of the river. 



In Northampton a sickle-shaped pond, at the western edge of the 

 meadow, represents the oldest cut-off. The second remains in a smaller 

 pond near the western curve of the third — the oxbow par excellence — 

 which is still a ring-shaped pond, in communication with the main stream 

 beneath the bridge of the Connecticut River Railroad. This was cut off 

 during the flood of 1840. Figures of the river, as seen from Mount Hol- 

 yoke before 1840, with the fine curve of the stream from 1840 to 1845, 

 after the cut-oft' and before the silting up of the mouths of the oxbow, are 

 given in the publication, Northampton, Meadow and City.^ 



OK THE DEFLECTIOlSr OF STREAJNIS TO THE RIGHT BAKK. 



The Connecticut River between Mount Toby and Mount Holyoke, 

 about 8 miles in a sti-aight line, flows across the broad, level bottom of the 

 ancient lake through thick, very fine-grained, and very homogenous deposits. 

 It is thus, together with its tributaries, favorably situated to give e^ddence 

 concerning the possible influence of the earth's rotation upon the erosion of 

 streams according to Ferrell's law, that a stream under the influence of the 



' F. N. Kneelantl, Northaniptou, 1894, p. 36. 



