RIVER ALLUVIONS, 



seme places jumbled together, in others arrfmged in 

 strata, which are interrupted or succeed each other 

 several times from the mountains to the coast, but 

 (constantly exhibiting the marks of matters rolled 

 down by the waters from the declivities above : and 

 this is in fact the origin of all this country. 



When we calculate the bulk, rapidity, and num- 

 Uer of all its rivers ; the Delaware, the Schuylkill, 

 the Susquehannah, the Potowinack, the Ra|>pahan- 

 Bock, the York, the James, &c. : when we observe, 

 that the streams of most of them are from 1200 to 

 4000 yards broad, and from twenty to fifty feet 

 deep, long before they reach their mouths ; and 

 that in their annual inundations they sometimes 

 Gverfiow the flat country to the depth of twenty- 

 feet; it is easy to conceive that such bodies of 

 "water must have occasioned prodigious changes in 

 ^lie soil, particularly, when in remote ages loftier 

 inountains gave more impetuosity to their course ; 

 when the trees of the forests, swept av/ay by thou- 

 sands, added force and materials to their ravages; 

 and when ice, accum.ulated during winters of six or 

 »even months continuance, produced enormous float- 

 ing masses on its breaking up, such as those of 

 which the Susquehannsh aiiorded an alarming spec- 

 tacle in ITSAj in which year a mound of ice more 

 than thirty feet high was heaped up at Maccall's 

 Ferry, below Columbia, and was on the point of 

 drowning the whole valley. At the period when the 

 waves of the sea washed the feet of the mountains ; 

 as its residua, which are found there universally, 

 frove beyond doubt it once did; these mountains 



