18709. ] The Formation of Cape Cod. 499 
being loose, yellowish in the color of its detritus, and with its 
boulders almost invariably angular except as they have been 
rounded by exposure to the weather. This deposit also appears to 
form the greater part of the cliffs upon the shores of these islands. 
At the north-east end of Naushon, however, in deepening an old 
well, from forty-five to sixty-seven feet, only the dark and com- 
pact lower till, or ground moraine, was found. 
The trend of this chain of islands is about east-north-east, but 
on the peninsula of Cape Cod the same belt of hills, continuing 
with its width, contour and material unchanged, bends within a 
few miles to a course nearly due north. A railroad cutting thirty 
feet deep in these deposits, near Wood’s Holl, and shallower 
sections on the Quisset hills, show two or three feet of yellowish 
till at top, succeeded below by light gray till, equally coarse but 
apparently more compact, with some of its fragments planed and 
striated. The latter was probably accumulated beneath the ice- 
margin, while the former was dropped by its meltings. 
After holding its way northward ten or twelve miles, reaching 
to a point about a mile south of North Sandwich, the range turns 
at a right angle to a course a few degrees south of east. Some 
portions of it in this vicinity are strown with boulders; but 
mainly, as shown on the roads which cross these hills south-west 
and south from Sandwich village, at the highest portion of the 
entire series, they consist of stratified gravel and sand with 
boulders rare or entirely wanting. There is also a change to a 
more simple contour with fewer irregular hills and hollows. 
From its angle the range extends about thirty-five miles to the 
east shore of the Cape. Through Sandwich and Barnstable it 
lies about a mile south of the railroad, consisting in the latter 
town of hills one hundred to two hundred feet high, apparently 
formed of modified drift, with frequent boulders embedded in it 
and scattered upon its surface. In Yarmouth the series is some- 
what broken, and the railroad crosses it upon a sand plain a lit- 
tle west of German’s hill. South of Dennis pond and for one 
and a half miles north-east from German’s hill to Follin’s pond, 
it is very well shown in exceedingly rocky low hills. Next it 
appears to suffer an offset of about two miles to the north, being 
represented by Scargo hill in Dennis, which is modified drift with 
only few boulders.’ Thence it runs a little north of east six miles 
to ore station, where it is again crossed by the railroad. 
