114 RECORDS 



smaller and angular portion of the sand, in which feldspar is 

 common, and particles of garnet, epidote and menaccanite also 

 occur, may possibly be residual, derived from decay of gneiss 

 adjacent to the shores of the ancient basin, the predominant 

 quartz grains, well-rounded and even perfectly spherical, could 

 not possibly be of that origin. These Doctor Julien has already 

 discussed before the Academy and elsewhere, pointing out that 

 their sculpture indicates prolonged action during ages before 

 they assumed spherical form and that although found in sedi- 

 ments, loose or consolidated, of all ages from the quartzites of 

 the Laurentian down to the sea beaches of the present day," 

 along river, lake and ocean, they represent in all cases ancient 

 materials which have been worked up over and over again from 

 period to period. In the Potsdam of the North American con- 

 tinent they have been accumulated in an extensive outer-beach 

 deposit, the result of an enormous resorting of materials through- 

 out the vast Cambrian time. These ''paleospheres " were 

 doubtless derived from the same Potsdam horizon which has 

 yielded the oolitic quartz sand of the "singing beach" on the 

 shores of Lake Champlain, near Plattsburg, not many miles 

 from the Wellstown outcrop of the Ordovician limestones. 



As to their method of transport, they had certainly not been 

 swept into this limestone basin by currents, since the absence of 

 sorting and the parallel disposition of their axes showed that 

 they had been dropped down from the surface in a continuous 

 gentle shower. The conditions which have favored this have 

 been studied abroad as well as along our Atlantic coast and 

 consist, first, of the coating of sand from the beaches along 

 sheltered bays, such as Long Island Sound, on every quietly 

 rising tide, then its seaward transport, often to hundreds of 

 miles off the coast, commonly caught in the dredges of survey- 

 ing steamers, as noted by Verrill and others, and its constant 

 deposition over the bottom, as illustrated by soundings at great 

 distances off Nantucket. Such a sand transport was plainly in 

 progress over the quiet embayment occupied by this limestone, 

 from surrounding beaches supplied from the decay and disin- 

 tegration of an ancient shore of Potsdam and Calciferous sand- 



