3 I 4 MYRON L. FULLER 



1888. Though not recognizing the true nature of the material, 

 he described a section of the Great Head Drumlin of Winthrop, 

 a few miles northeast of Boston, and showed that beneath the 

 great mass of clayey material, now known to be till, it possessed 

 a core of fine loose gravel rising several feet above the base of 

 the section (sea level), and containing fossil fragments of Venus 

 mercenaria and other species identical with those existing in the 

 waters of the harbor at the present time. 



In 1888, Upham 1 also referred to the presence of the core 

 of modified drift in the drumlin at Great Head, Winthrop, and 

 announced the presence of similar cores in drumlins at Third and 

 Fourth Cliffs at Scituate, some twenty-five miles southeast of 

 Boston. No evidence as to age was brought forth beyond the 

 fact that the stratified deposits were of glacial origin and ante- 

 dated the ice advance, supposedly the last by which their till 

 coating was deposited. 



Shaler 2 was probably the first in Massachusetts to call atten- 

 tion prominently to the occurrence of two distinct tills separated 

 by a long interglacial period. According to him the deposition 

 of the oldest formation of Nantucket, which he describes as a 

 blue pebbly clay till was followed by a long period of submer- 

 gence and the deposition of fossiliferous marine beds, after which 

 the ice again advanced, partly eroding the marine beds and giv- 

 ing rise to the well-known morainic deposits of the north shore 

 of the island. 



In his paper on the "Structure of Drumlins" 3 Upham, in 

 1899, gave a detailed description of the drumlins of Third and 

 Fourth Cliffs at Scituate and illustrated the descriptions by sec- 

 tions, one of which showed the presence of till both above and 

 beneath the stratified core of the drumlins. The section appar- 

 ently demonstrated that the stratified deposits were interglacial, 

 at least in the narrow sense of the word, for they were evidently 



1 Marine Shells and Fragments of Shells in the Till near Boston. Boston Soc. 

 Nat. Hist. Proa, Vol. XXIV, pp. 127-132. 



2 The Geology of Nantucket, U. S. Geol. Surv., Bull. 23. 



3 Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Proa, Vol. XXIV, pp. 228-242. 



