; 64 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION, 
the well digger his efforts to obtain a copious water supply are 
frustrated ; yet on fresh attempts with the same objects, at a few feet 
or yards distance from the scene of baffled labors, water bearing 
strata are met with much nearer to the earth surface. These facts 
are frequently made profitable use of by pretenders, or else experts, 
in the mysterious uses of the witch-hazel branches or so-called 
divining-rod. 
In the alluvial or loamy superficial strata too, boulders of vary- 
ing shapes and sizes are of frequent occurrence, even in thoroughly 
well cultivated districts, and the queries as to “the when and the how” 
of their arrival in their present ‘‘ site” frequently arises in the minds 
of these whose interest is found in the removal of these time resisting 
masses to places where they may prove less hindersome, or perhaps 
_of high utility, in the hands of the stone mason artizan. These 
boulders vary as much perhaps in their chemical composition and 
graining as they do in shape and size or volume,—a medley of 
granite, gneisis, slaty-limestone and innumerable softer species of rock, 
with, at times, a superficial loose stratum consisting of unworn frag- 
ments of rock, containing fossil impressions, called ‘‘ drift” mixed 
with rounded gravel and loam or sand. Workmen engaged in the 
digging out and removal of these boulders notice that the ‘‘ big end” 
or heaviest end of them is usually undermost in the earthy matrix 
and that not infrequently specimens are met with a few feet or a few 
yards apart whose surfaces indicate that the two have once been 
united, as a fractured side has notches and ledges that fit in and 
seem to form a counterpart to answering unevenness in a contiguous 
fragment. We remember a member of our family, who on one 
occasion was busy disinterring one of these alluvial boulders of a 
rather unusual magnitude, and on being approached by a chance 
_passer-by who at once noticed that the big seeming rock had a separ- 
ating chasm of the width of 3 or 4 feet, compactly filled in with hard 
soil, asked his opinion as to the agency or power that must have 
caused the disruption and separation, he promptly gave the conjec- 
ture: ‘“‘ Why, lightning, one would think,” having evidently not a 
vestige of a doubt that the two divorced objects had once been in 
unity. These common experiences give cogency to the surmises of 
geologists as to a flooded condition of the earth’s surface on the 
