BOUNDARY OF THE GLACIATED AREA. 137 



With these remarks, we are prepared to come to the spe- 

 cific subject of the present chapter, namely, the character 

 and extent of the glacial deposits marking the southern bor- 

 der of the glaciated area in North America. Through a por- 

 tion of the distance these accumulations are so marked as to 

 merit the name of terminal moraines. Through another 

 portion that name is hardly applicable to anything near the 

 glacial border. In a subsequent chapter there will be a dis- 

 tinct discussion of the whole question of moraines. In this 

 it is our purpose to follow somewhat minutely the boundary 

 of the area, and detail its various aspects. 



Off the coast of Maine the ice, at its culminating period, 

 extended an unknown distance into the sea, surmounting thb 

 eminences of Mount Desert and all that rock-bound coast, and 

 leaving its terminal deposits in water so deep that there is 

 little hope of ever determining its exact situation. But in 

 southeastern Massachusetts the deposits emerge from the 

 water as true moraines, and offer themselves as most interest- 

 ing objects of study. Nantucket, Tuckernuck, Chappaquid- 

 dick, Martha's Vineyard, No Man's Land, and Block Island 

 are but portions of the extreme terminal moraine whose back 

 emerges at these points from the water. Cape Cod, from 

 Provincetown to Wood's Holl and the Elizabeth Islands, is a 

 similar remnant of a vast moraine formed after the ice-front 

 had withdrawn a short distance to the north. Indeed, the 

 whole of Plymouth and Barnstable counties is " made land," 

 as really as that of the Back Bay in Boston, only in the one 

 case the earth was dumped, day by day, from the laborer's 

 cart, and in the other year by year, from the melting front 

 of the continental ice-sheet. 



It is an instance of misleading poetic license which per- 

 mits us to sing of the " rock-bound " shore upon which the 

 Pilgrim Fathers landed, for there are no rock-bound shores 

 in southeastern Massachusetts. The hills which first greeted 

 the eyes of the Pilgrim Fathers are the irregular morainic 

 accumulations so frequently characteristic of glacial margins. 

 In this case the soil composing them consists of sand, gravel, 



