ANCIENT GLACIERS. 



77 



vegetation and soil stripped away anbT the various subsoils 

 laid bare. Occasionally, ridges may be tracked continu- 

 ously for several miles, running like great artificial ram- 

 parts across the country. These vary in breadth and 



N.W, 



s. E. 



Fig. 29.— Section of kame near Dover, New Hampshire. Length, three hundred 

 feet ; height, forty feet ; hase, about forty feet above the Cocheco River, or 

 seventy-five feet above the sea. a, a, gray clay; b, fine sand; c, c, coarse 

 gravel containing pebbles from six inches to one foot and a half in diameter; 

 d, d, fine gravel (Upham). 



height, some of the more conspicuous ones being upward 

 of four or five hundred feet broad at the base, and sloping 

 upward at an angle of twenty-five or even thirty-five de- 

 grees, to a height of sixty feet and more above the general 

 surface of the ground. It is most common, however, to 

 find mounds and ridges confusedly intermingled, crossing 

 and recrossing each other at all angles, so as to enclose 

 deep hollows and pits between. Seen from some dominant 

 point, such an assemblage of kames, as they are called, 

 looks like a tumbled sea — the ground now swelling into 

 long undulations, now rising suddenly into beautiful peaks 

 and cones, and anon curving up in sharp ridges that often 

 wheel suddenly round so as to enclose a lakelet of bright 

 clear water.* 



In New England attention was first directed to kames 

 in 1842, by President Edward Hitchcock, in a paper be- 

 fore the American Association of Geologists and Natural- 

 ists, describing the gravel ridges in Andover, Mass. In 

 the accompanying plate is shown a portion of this kame 

 system, which has a double interest to me from the fact 

 that it was while living upon the banks of the Shawshin 



* The Great Ice Age, pp. 210, 21 1 ? 



