THE FRIENDLY ROCKS 
How one would like to know the history of this 
conglomerate that caps the higher Catskills! What 
stone-crusher reduced the quartz rock and sorted 
the fragments so evenly? The stone-crushing plant 
that turned out the material for most of the other 
rocks ground “exceeding fine,” but in this instance 
they turned out a very coarse product, though a 
very uniform one. On the shores of some Paleozoic 
sea have these pebbles been rolled and worn. Only 
upon one sea-beach have I seen pebbles of this size 
in lieu of sand, and that was upon Dover beach, on 
the coast of England. Instead of the hissing of the 
sands when the breakers come in, there rises the 
sound of the multitudinous rattling of these myr- 
iads of pebbles. Some old Devonian seashore has 
sent up a like sound where these Catskill pebbles 
were washed by the waves. 
The rock-crushing plants must have been very 
busy in the early geologic ages, and quartz rock 
must have been a drug in the market. We see no 
natural forces at work now reducing rocks to coarse 
gravel on any scale comparable to that which must 
have taken place in Silurian times when the Shaw- 
angunk rocks and the Oneida conglomerate were 
laid down. In any case, where were the quartz 
mountains from which they came, and where were 
the forces that ground them up? “From lands to 
the eastward,” geologists think, but of such lands 
there are no traces now. 
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