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a 
Geology and Mineralogy. ‘ 385 
also ice-floes; for water alone could not make such local drop- 
pings among the fine deposits. 
The characteristics are, in fact, quite closely those of the strati- 
Jied drift of the valley. The abundant mica and the occasional 
pebbles of mica schist in the Portland beds (east of Middletown, 
Ct.) were evidently brought in by a stream from the northeast 
flowed ov mica schist. The great 
and thick conglomerate of Montague and Sunderland, Massa- 
chusetts, wonderful for its coarseness, its stones being. gener- 
ley; and judging from the greater extent of the Triassic deposit, 
they must have been vaster floods, or else longer continued, than 
those from the melting glacier. And “occasional masses three or 
four feet in diameter ” (E. Hitchcock) make certain the presence 
of ice-floes, 
© great ice-carrying floods seem to demand for their origin a 
laciated condition for the Monadnock region and the White 
ountains and other elevations of New Hampshire and New 
England, 
hus the facts seem to show that the era of the Red sandstone 
Was one of great precipitation, with one or more long intervals of 
excessive cold. nd the character and limits of the deposits are 
Sides) in American geological history. 
t 1s a strong argument, I think, against the supposed cross 
“onnection of the areas that they all have a direction parallel to 
the earlier lines of uplift. The area passing through Pennsy|- 
Vania has igmoid form which characterizes 
