276 G. H. Kinahan—LIrish Esker Drift. 
We thus have evidence of an old Archean valley opening 
from a higher region to the eastward into what is now the Pitts- 
field part of the Housatonic Valley. Besides the chondroditic 
limestone, in the village of Hinsdale, along a wider part of the 
valley, southwest of Hinsdale, west of the railroad, I found a 
large mass of the same limestone, which I think is in place; so 
that it is probable that limestone of Archean age first deter- 
mined the formation of that part of the upper Housatonic 
valley leading into Pittsfield: 
jf. The wide Tyringham Valley, which extends southeast from 
South Lee for fiveor six miles, and is the course of a broad arm 
of the Stockbridge limestone, is another case in which the lime- 
stone spreads eastward beyond its usual limit, although not by 
an abrupt shift. The valley is not narrow, like those shaped 
by modern erosion, although owing much to this cause for its 
present condition. Moreover, it has the qiartzyte formation 
on much of its eastern side, and, beyond this, Archean gneisses 
and hornblende and augitic rocks, with some localities of chon- 
droditic limestone. The South Lee valley, coming down from 
Becket to the eastward, has similar features for a mile and a_ 
half. On the high hill in South Lee between the entrances to 
the two valleys, the T'yringham and South Lee, there is a large 
area of hornblendic rocks of Archeean age, where the associated 
limestone afforded me chondrodite in masses as large as the 
fist, recalling similar localities in Sussex County, N. J., and 
Orange County, N. Y.; and the same rocks occur on the 
opposite side of the South Lee Valley to the northeastward. 
Archean limestone occurs also in the bottom of the South Lee 
valley itself, about a mile from the village. 
These facts are here introduced as other illustrations of the 
influence on the outlines of the Stockbridge limestone areas 
exerted by preéxisting Archean channels or bays. They fur- 
ther prove that the great quartzyte formation, which makes 
the foundation of the Paleozoic of the region, derived its mate- 
rial from Archeean formations of the vicinity not from the 
fabled Atlantis, which some geologists have looked to for aid 
in the making of American stratified rocks. 
[To be continued. | 
Art. XXXI.—Irish Esker Drift; by G. H. Ktinanan, M.R.LA. 
UNFORTUNATELY, as | have already pointed out in this 
Journal, American observers, like the early recorders of the 
Scotch and the Scandinavian later drifts, have ‘‘ got mixed ;” 
they confounding together true “ Hsker drift” and ridges of 
