On Bowlders and Rolled Stones. J55 



When mixed as it generally is with a little clay, lime, and 

 vegetable mould, it forms a very productive soil, on every 

 hill, on every mountain, where there is room for the plough 

 or hoe. Had it not been for this M^ry benevolent process 

 of grinding the granite and other rocks to powder, to dust, 

 and preparing the soil in that way, New-Engiand, (which 

 now with proper cultivation is very productive,) could not 

 probably have been inhabited, and indeed but a small, if 

 any, part of the earth. For, undoubtedly, the rich mead- 

 ows and extensive valleys, owe their present form so con- 

 venient to man for tillage, as well as the richness of the 

 soil, in a great measure to the same cause. The fact being 

 once established that the earth was long covered with wa- 

 ter, it would seem to account at once for those rounded, 

 and other rocks found every where in ascending streams 

 and hills, although no similar rocks should be found in the 

 higher situations immediately contiguous. Those blocks 

 perhaps were detached by ice from their native beds, and 

 being rounded and transported by the currents, might be 

 deposited any where at random. Floating ice at the 

 present day, often transports large and small fragments of 

 rocks from remote regions, and deposits them in more 

 southern latitudes, and they often become rounded by sub- 

 sequent attrition. The waters appear to have formed al- 

 so the cavities of ponds in every stream where there is a fall 

 of water into sand or loose earth, the water heaving up the 

 sand at the spot where it strikes, then carries it forward, and 

 the sand of course grows more and more shallow. Exact- 

 ly in the same manner the earth appears to have been ex- 

 cavated to form the basins of ponds. No waters but those 

 of the ocean could in most cases have been the cause of 

 these excavations. 



I have already remarked that the vallies that shoot up 

 between mountains have invariably, at their outlet, a depos- 

 it of gravel, a fact which 1 will illustrate by a single exam- 

 ple. This valley lies between two hills which are six or 

 seven hundred feet high on the west side of Fairlee Pond. 

 From the sand up this valley, it is but a little over a mile to a 

 swamp from which the waters descend easterly down this val- 

 ley to the pond, northerly and to Wait's River. The waters 

 that flowed easteily, and passed between two hills ovef 

 a ridge of rocks that was more than one hundred ieei high- 



