74 W. UPHAM — DERIVATION OF KAMES, ESKERS, AND MORAINES. 



massive, irregular grouped and connected kames, or hills and short 

 ridges of gravel and sand, distinctly stratified, often in oblique layers, 

 and containing water-worn pebbles and cobbles of all sizes up to a foot 

 in diameter, but having few large bowlders or none. Harbor hill, the 

 highest point on Long island, Jane's, Ruland's, and Osborn's hills are of 

 this modified drift ; as also is nearly the entire range,, both in its lower 

 portions and at its highest summits, through this distance of about 

 eighty miles. Wheatly and Kirby hills, however, *are exceptions, being 

 composed of till, wdiile in a few other places, generally of small area, 

 bowlders are found in abundance. 



Heights of the most prominent summits in their order from west to 

 east along this part of the moraine are as follows : Harbor hill, half a 

 mile east of Roslyn, 384 feet above the sea; Wheatly hill, three miles 

 farther east, about 380 feet ; Spring hill, two miles northeast, and Kirby 

 hill, three miles east from the last, each about 350 feet ; Jane's hill, the 

 highest of the West hills, 354 feet; the Dix and Comae hills, about 250 

 feet ; Pine hill and Mount Pleasant, west of Ronkonkoma lake, about 200 

 feet ; the Bald and Selden hills, 200 to 300 feet ; Ruland's, the highest 

 of the Coram hills, 340 feet; Homan's hill, north of Yaphank, about 250 

 feet; Terry's hill, south of Manorville, about 175 feet; Rock and Canada 

 hills, about 200 feet; Spring hill, about 250 feet, and Osborn's or Bald 

 hill, 293 feet, the last two being a few miles southwest from Riverhead ; 

 the East hills, and the range onward to Canoe place, 150 to 200 feet ; 

 Sugarloaf, the highest of the Shinnecock hills, 140 feet ; the Pine hills, 

 150 to 250 feet, reaching their greatest elevation three miles southwest 

 from Sag Harbor ; and Stpny hill, a mile northeast from Amagansett, 

 161 feet. 



My exploration and study of this long range of morainic kamres leads 

 me to ascribe them confidently to streams formed upon the surface of 

 the ice-sheet by its ablation and by rains, having their beginnings many 

 miles back from the ice-front, gathering much of the englacial drift which 

 had become superglacial, and depositing the coarser part of their load 

 in these hills of gravel and sand at their mouths, where their compara- 

 tively steep and rapid descent from the ice was slackened by reaching 

 the open land at its border. 



The alternative view supposes that the kame gravel and sand which 

 we find to have been amassed in such vast amount along this part of the 

 ice-front were brought there by subglacial streams coursing across the 

 bed of Long Island sound, ascending thence from 200 to 400 feet in their 

 tunnels beneath the ice, carrying the modified drift upward to their 

 mouths at the ice-border, and accumulating it in these hills 100 to 250 

 feet above the intermediate hollows. From this moraine a low plain of 



