Connecticut River Valley. Q11 
trunk of a tree has been cleft in twain, no eye is so unpractised as 
not to distinguish between the surface of the cleft, and the natural 
surface of the bark or the wood under the bark. When a limb 
has fallen from a forest tree, every one knows, at a glance, that it 
has been rent and fractured, whether the severed limb remains or 
has been removed. ‘The structure and natural surfaces of rock lie 
less open to common observation than the growth and cleaving of 
trees. Yet who that inspects the unhewn blocks collected for chis- 
selling by the stone cutter, does not perceive in their rough, ir- 
regular and angular surfaces, that they have been broken by force 
from some larger mass? So in the quarry, every one judges that the 
blocks before him have been rent and severed by violent means. 
Indeed in all situations, rocks recently broken present, to the most 
common observation, ample proof of such fracture. Of fragments 
which have long been broken up, some fall into water courses, where 
they are smoothed and rounded into pebbles. Some remain upon the 
surface of the ground, and according as they are softer or harder, 
lose more or less of the sharper edges and the freshness of recent 
fracture. ‘Their surfaces may have crumbled and become covered 
with lichens or moss; yet in many, especially such as have long been 
protected from decay by a covering of earth, may still be seen the 
peculiarities of form, the rising, sinking, angular, ever varying sur- 
face, which, in a large proportion of rocks, characterize forcible sep- 
aration and fracture. 
The vicinity of Hartford, from the extent of the alluvial formation, 
does not abound with fragments such as have been mentioned. But 
the surface of the country, for many miles around the White Moun- 
iains, 1s covered with countless masses of dislocated rocks. In as- 
cending Mount Washington, the visiter steps upon them, he sees them 
on all sides; and finds at the summit many acres of huge fragments, 
broken, piled, and lodged against each other, without tree, or shrub, 
or herbage to obstruct his view. He walks between and beneath 
them, among interstices unfilled with earth or soil. Lichens have 
fastened upon the surfaces, and mosses grow in the deep recesses of 
the rocky fragments. The rocks are granite of exceeding hardness. 
Time, even in the cold temperature of those elevated summits, has 
indented and grooved some less enduring portions of the rock. But 
the marks and features peculiar to broken rocks, the rising, sinking, 
angular, ever varying forms, remain as manifest on the surface of the 
huge fragments of these mountaintops, as in the quarry, or the un- 
hewn blocks collected for the stone cutter. 
