CHARLES B. WARRING. 275 
from Tappan Zee. It is noted for the excellence of its 
fruit and other productions, and especially for its su- 
perior grapes. The surface is almost level, bounded by 
wooded slopes, which are everywhere steep and in some 
parts almost perpendicular, as perpendicular as is possi- 
ble for sand and clay to lie. I do not think there is any 
bed rock visible, at least I have seen none. The point is 
divided into two parts, separated by a morass now cov- 
ered with salt meadow. From seventy feet above the 
water the surface descends very abruptly to its level. 
Crossing the morass, the land rises in the same manner 
nearly or quite to the same height. There is an island 
in the morass at the mouth of the passage through the 
point of about the same height as the rest, and its sides 
are equally steep. 
Through the neck of this spit of land the Hudson 
river railroad company has made a deep cutting. 
About two years ago they drew away many thousand 
yards of material for filling, and so removed the débris 
which had largely accumulated, and in fact they stripped 
the sides of the cutting bare from the bottom to top, 
thus revealing very beautifully its structure. The ac- 
companying diagram was made within a few weeks of 
that time. The measurements were made with a twelve- 
foot pole let down from the surface by an assistant 
while the writer, standing in the cut below, and at a 
sufficient distance back, directed how far to put it down. 
The measurements were thirty feet apart. The Croton 
river comes into the Hudson a little to the left and 
south of the cutting. 
It will be seen that there are three divisions in the 
construction of the bank. The first and largest consists 
of layers of very fine sand, having in the bottom part 
of each (and nowhere else), considerable coarse gravel 
at the south end, and more or less all along, but finer as 
the distance increased. These layers are sharply de- 
159 
