86 Davis — Terraces of the Westfield River ^ Mass. 



10. The flight of terraces hy Pochassic Street. — The finest 

 flight of terraces hereabouts is preserved a httle east of a small 

 settlement, known as Pochassic Street, on the southeastern 

 slope of Pochassic hill, a drumlin, around whose base abundant 

 ledges have been discovered. The settlement and drumlin are 

 just to the left of the limit of figure 6. The highest terrace, 

 H, shows waterworn cobbles and pebbles on its plain ; the 

 boulderj slope of Pochassic hill rises behind it. Terraces are 

 usually counted upward from the valley floor in the reverse 

 order from that of their production. It will be convenient 

 here to follow the natural order and count downward, beginning 

 with the plain and scarp of the highest terrace as number one. 

 Thickets of small trees and bushes obscure man}^ details here, 

 and some of the terrace plains are inconveniently swampy near 

 their back border, perhaps because of ledges farther forward 

 by which the ground water is held up. Hence the correlation 

 of some of the terraces in this locality is doubtful, as indicated 

 by the blanks left in the figure. A flight of at least nine steps, 

 H-M, may, however, be counted, all presenting characteristic 

 concave fronts in what may be called the Pochassic reentrant, 

 all curving forward at their down-valley ends to defending 

 ledges, and all of similar height, roughly from eight to fifteen 

 feet. A later terrace occasionally undercuts an earlier one, so 

 that the two scarps are locally united in a slope of more than 

 the average height ; such being the case with the fifth-sixth 

 scarp, along whose base hes a narrow country road in the mid- 

 dle of the reentrant ; a little farther east and west the scarp is 

 divided into two (or more) parts by a narrow terrace that comes 

 forward at an intermediate level ; thus what seem to be the fifth 

 and sixth swings of the river may be identified. 



The uppermost terrace may be followed along its scarped 

 front through the second growth of bushes and trees past two 

 defended cusps, H and H', beyond which it turns to the north- 

 east and at a distance of half a mile or so seems to run tangent 

 to another drumlin. The second terrace is not identified on 

 the first ledge, H, but appears on the second, H^ ; it seems to 

 fade away on the broad plain a quarter of a mile to the north- 

 east. The third terrace is caught on both ledges, H and H^ ; 

 it then runs eastward half a mile and is undercut at G by the 

 large reentrant between Prospect hill (the Westfield spur) and 

 Brown's spur. Shortly before it is cut away, a low terrace 

 turns ofl northeastward from it and seems to continue some 

 distance ; hence what has just been called the third scarp might 

 be taken to represent the fourth northward swing of the river. 



It is important to note that the sharp curvature and large 

 arc of the reentrants in the first and third scarps in connection 

 with the ledges at H and H^ are much more consistent with the 



