100 The American Naturalist. [January, 



surface south of Lambert's Lane, where the road ascends its somewhat 

 steeply sloping sides. Now the question seems an interesting one 

 whether the springs on the north-west side of the trap ridge may not 

 be regarded as flowing from heads of water in New Jersey, as the trap 

 dike would seem to preclude the derivation of their supply from the 

 water shed of the hilly parts of the Island. The low flat lands 

 enclosed in the curved arm of the trap, which, as is well known, 

 stretches out into Long Neck, is mainly a sandy region and I think 

 does not possess the arrangement of impervious drift clay and water- 

 bearing gravels noticeable in our water-bearing district. Just a few 

 rods from Graniteville, on the Old Place road, there rises a spring 

 which seems to come up on the eastern wall of the trap, and at Lam- 

 bert's Lane, where the coarse trap rock crops out on the surface, a 

 spring comes up on the west side of the trap. Do these two springs 

 acquire the hydrostatic pressure which makes them spring from differ- 

 ent quarters, and in each case is the wall of trap the cause of their 

 rising where they do ? Furthermore the ridge south of Long Neck, 

 and separated from the latter by a shallow hollow, up which an arm 

 of the Fresh Kills extends, so exactly imitates the low, rounded and 

 long dome-like back of Long Neck itself and so suggests that there is a 

 bifurcation of the trap ridge, or a parallel vent at this point, and if so 

 the wells of the Crystal Water Works, at the end of this ridge, are 

 also separated from the water shed of the Island by a trap wall and 

 may represent a water source situated in New Jersey. Springs are 

 found on either side of this suppositional second (?) trap flow and it 

 may form a deep-seated barrier between two different areas of water 

 drainage, the area north and west of it belonging to New Jersey, the 

 area south or east of it probably insular. 



Mr. Arthur Hollick called attention to the fact that in a paper 

 entitled " A Few Words About Our Water Supply," published in the 

 Staten Island Magazine for August 1888, the relation of the trap dike 

 to the water supply was commented upon in the following words : " I 

 can well remember the mystery which was supposed to be inseparable 

 from the source of the springs [east of the trap ridge] * * * * s° me 

 persons even went as far as the Orange Mountains in New Jersey to 

 account for them, utterly ignoring the fact that the immense trap dike, 

 which begins at the Palisades, forms Bergen Neck, crosses the Kills 

 and extends through our Island from Port Richmond to Linoleumville, 

 entirely cuts them off from this source." 



Mr. Hollick remarked that it was a matter of considerable interest 

 to find that two observe- had arrived indrnon-hntlv at practically 



