OOTLIHES. 
157 
down the slopes into the valleys and bottoms of the streams to the flood- 
plain, they will be found to have changed character with every rod of ad- 
vance, all the gold having been dropped either on or near the foot of the 
slopes, the pebbles being more exclusively quartz, and more and more 
rounded, and accumulated in a stratum at the bottom of the bed, or con- 
stituting the whole of it. 
Accumulations of the character above described as till, or initial drift , 
may be seen everywhere on the hills and slopes of the piedmont region, 
and, less conspicuously, even into the eastern territory, of the Quaternary 
proper. Any where on the hills or declivities about Raleigh for example, 
notably in the railroad cuts, may be seen masses of earth 4 or 8 feet thick 
along the lower portion of which the angular quartz fragments have be- 
gun to accumulate; frequently the vein is visible beneath from which the 
fragments have been moved but a few feet or inches down the slope. Of 
course no movement can take place at such a depth now ; that must have 
ceased with the arctic cold which could freeze the soil to such depths. 
The railroad cuts through the piedmont region, especially from Mor- 
ganton to the foot of the Blue Ridge furnish many admirable sections of 
hill side drift. The most interesting is 9 miles be} 7 ond Morganton, known 
as Leonard’s cut. On the upper slope of a high hill a cut of 80 feet ex- 
poses a bed of peat and drift wood 15 feet thick with the underlying soil 
filled with stumps and roots. Above the peat is a bed of rudely statified 
gravel and sand, 10 to 15 feet deep, on which grows the present forest. 
In the peat are numerous shining wing-covers of beetles and seeds of 
many species of plants, cones of several kinds of pine, and of hemlock, 
squirrel-gnawed hickory nuts, seed pods of kalmia, &c. No species have 
been observed which are not found at present living in the region, al- 
though the hemlock and white pine are not found nearer than the Blue 
Ridge, some 30 or 40 miles away. The bottom of this cut is 100 feet 
above the surface of the Catawba River, 1 mile distant. Nearly all the 
hills of this region are shown by these railroad sections to owe their pres- 
ent form and pressure mainly to the drift beds which fill up and round 
out their flanks, to a thickness of 1 or 2 to 15 or 20 feet, and occasionally 
much more, and frequently crown their summits, or even make up their 
whole mass, the present ravines being excavated along, or across the crests 
of the old buried hills and rocky ledges. In several of these railroad sec- 
tions there are plainly distinguishable two periods of drift, the lower, of 
different materials, frequently indurated, generally by an iron cement, and 
its surface eroded and covered with a second pebble and gravel bed. And in 
some of them again, for example that of Hemphill cut near Old Fort, is a 
bed of gray indurated and in places sandy clay, in which are embedded 
25 
