Vegetable, mineral or animal? 



Curious concentric circles in Shawangunk quartzite, on Kittatinny Mountain, 

 N. J., which have received a wide variety of interpretations 



Raymond H. Torrey 



There is one chance in three that the objects described in 

 this article may have been of vegetable origin, and as the editor 

 of Torreya has offered me an opportunity to describe them, this 

 account is presented in a botanical journal. I do not offer any 

 positive explanation, but tell what I found and what others 

 thought of them. Perhaps this will bring out further views which 

 may clear the matter up. 



While working on the Appalachian Trail, on Kittatinny 

 Mountain, in Warren County, New Jersey, above five miles 

 northeast of Delaware Water Gap. two summers ago, with 

 Louis W. Anderson, of Elizabeth, N. J., our course was diverted 

 from an older trail by the devastation of a recent forest fire 

 to seek a better route along the edge of the wet swale known as 

 Tock's Swamp, from which Tock's Run drops steeply down to 

 the Delaware River. Beside this swamp, along what is now 

 marked as the Appalachian Trail, was a large oblong boulder, 

 about eight feet long, a foot or two through, and three or four 

 feet out of the wet soil, in which half of it was probably buried. 

 Anderson's eye first caught, and he called to me to see, a num- 

 ber of concentric rings on both faces of the boulder. The photo- 

 graphs in the illustrations of this article, made by Anderson, 

 show them very well. 



It seemed to me they must be fossils of some sort, from the 

 regularity of the concentric structure. I recalled the pictures I 

 had seen in some of the New York State Museum Reports, 

 about 1917, of the similar circles in Cambrian limestone in the 

 Mohawk Valley, particularly in Lester Park, near Saratoga, 

 N. Y., which have been called Cryptozoon proliferum, and are 

 believed by many paleontologists to be fossils of Cambrian lime 

 secreting algae. But the boulder in which the rings at Tock's 

 Swamp occurred is of the hard quartzose rock, known as 

 Shawangunk Grit or Shawangunk Quartzite, a Silurian forma- 

 tion, which caps the Shawangunk and Kittatinny Mountains, 

 from Mohonk Lake in Ulster County, N. Y., southwest through 



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