Il6 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



Beneath the soil and on the pebble bed lie the bones of walrus 

 in considerable quantity all about the northwest point. I have re- 

 ferred to the occurrence of these in similar position on the other 

 islands. They date back to a century and more ago when the walrus 

 was regularly hunted on the islands, being driven upon the low 

 shores from the ice pans and slaughtered at leisure by the fishermen. 

 Over these bones the soil has formed to a depth of several inches. 



The sea has cut away this rock with great rapidity, and is yearly 

 changing the outline of this northwestern shore. When Mr S, G. W. 

 Benjamin wrote his inviting sketches of the islands^ he gave a picture 

 of two rock pillars off the north shore, long known as the " Old 

 Man " and the " Old Woman." They fell under the waves some 

 twenty years ago, and since their destruction new rock tables and 

 monuments have been carved from the island mass. 



The volcanic-gypsum belt. This area makes a broad belt across 

 the island and its topography is that quite characteristic of many 

 gypsif erous regions — a rather badly broken surface, due in no 

 small part to hydration and solution. It is a region of short drainage 

 ways leading down from the hills and running into or through small 

 bogs and marshes, blind sink holes, irregular and formless knolls. 

 But it is for the most part a fairly fertile soil. In geology this belt 

 is composed of gypseous clays and more solid masses in extreme 

 disorder traversed by veins of the crystallized sulfate, the rock 

 masses varying greatly in color from greens and grays into purple- 

 red and pink. While the absence of an orderly bedding is a very 

 evident feature of these extensive deposits there are places where 

 the beds are clearly arranged in horizontal layers with alternating 

 colors. I have here given an illustration in approximately correct 

 tints of a cliff exposure where light pinks and blue grays produce 

 a very surprising color effect. This is on the south shore. With 

 and among these gypseous beds are frequent igneous masses exposed 



seismograph at Albany failed to record any such motion on the day men- 

 tioned. Such a single wave of greater magnitude might well have washed 

 the' beach debris over the red sandstone cliffs by a single pulsation affecting 

 simultaneously all these low cliffs of all the islands alike, burying and kill- 

 ing the grass with its mantle of gravel which has eventually worked its 

 way down into the decomposing rock, 



iThe Atlantic Islands as Resorts of Health and Pleasure, chap. 4, 1878; 

 The Cruise of the " Alice May " ; the Century Magazine, 1884. 



Some recent magazine articles by Yeigh and by Amy refer to these rocks 

 as still standing — statements quite comparable in accuracy to many others 

 regarding the islands that these short trip artists have chosen to put down. 



