FIELD AND STUDY 



In a recent motor-car tour in the, States south of 

 me — Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, East 

 Tennessee, and North Carolina — my interest in 

 the landscape was greatly heightened through my 

 knowledge of some of the larger facts of geology. 

 The deep, V-shaped valleys, in contradistinction to 

 my own broad, U-shaped valleys, at once caught 

 my eye. In many places the sides of the valleys were 

 so steep, and the tops of the hills so smooth and 

 round, that the farms were on their summits and 

 the hillsides left wooded. I should not have known 

 how to account for these features had I not known 

 that we were beyond the limits' of the great con- 

 tinental glacier that swept over -the northern part 

 of the country many thousands of years ago, and 

 which so broadened and deepened our valleys and 

 strewed the landscape with rocks and stones. In 

 many places in West Virginia one could see where 

 there had been local glaciers by the drift boulders 

 and rocky fragments scattered over the fields. In 

 going from the Catskill region to the mountainous 

 region of Pennsylvania, one sees a change in the 

 landscape that his knowledge of this great ice- 

 sheet, and of the geological formation of the two 

 sections, helps to clear up. The farm lands in Penn- 

 sylvania are not stony and rock-strewn as they are 

 in parts of New York. In the Catskills the rock- 

 strata lie in thin horizontal sheets, and are easily 

 disrupted and torn away. In the mountains of 

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