\2s The American Geologist. August, 
chance formations, but they belong to a beautiful and wonderful system 
of drainage. I have followed these old river channels through the ter- 
minal moraine, from depressions in the north, and they begin to ramify 
in the same way as they enter the plain on the south, and the huiu- 
mocky ridges are more or less prominent, and complicated according to 
the size and sweep of the ancient currents. The so-called sand-dunes 
of Easthampton, have no counterpart on the island as far as their pe- 
culiar contour is concerned, yet, when Mr. Howell of Southhampton 
called my attention to them in 188G, I at once conjectured their origin, 
although they had always been a puzzle to him. He wrote: "These 
are veritable sand-dunes of white sand, covered with a growth of ordi- 
nary beach grass, and a geological puzzle. If we could say they were 
deposited by a cyclone it would shorten matters, but we can't, and there 
is a difficulty in holding that they are signs of an old beach line. It is 
with me a standing puzzle." A study of like phenomena on the west end 
of the island gave me the key to unlock the mystery, and I explained 
their origin to him although the locality had never been visited by me. 
A brief visit to Easthampton in 1S91 fully confirmed my conjectures. 
I went over them carefully in my second visit, only a few weeks ago, and 
now I am more confident than ever that subglacial streams played an 
important part in their formation. The sand in the hills is finely lami- 
nated, but the surface of the narrow wall-like top ridges are covered 
with till containing small fragments of rock, not so much water-worn as 
the pebbles found between the ridges. In a bank by the side of the road, 
underneath what appeared to be englacial till, was a deposit of clay sev- 
eral feet in thickness, containing some boulders of the cobble stone or- 
der, mostly quartz and fragments of Archean rock. One I found of hard 
sandstone with a brown crust something like a loaf of bread baked hard 
in a slow oven. It was similar to one found by me at Phoenix Hill, 
Louisville, Ky., in the clay covering the limestone rock. It was a sin- 
gular coincidence and it impressed me very much. 
The spaces between the ridges which are amphitheater-like in form,. 
contain some of the best farming lands of the Hamptons, and during 
my last visit the air was sweetly scented by the fields of clover, while 
the ridges enclosing them were scantily covered with coarse grass, 
with here and there a shrub or dwarfish cedar. They are cer- 
tainly singular formations like the drift mounds of Olympia, yet 
any one familiar with such phenomena can see they are not " veritable 
sand-dunes,''' but are due to streams of water which flowed at one time- 
from the main ridge some two or three miles distant. Their submarine 
origin, as held by some, I think, is out of the question. 
If the drift mounds of Olympia and the Easthampton Tidges are in 
any way related then Mr. Rogers and the present writer are not very- 
wide apart, after all, in the conclusions arrived at as regards their ori- 
gin. I hold however, that the streams that formed them were in a 
sense subglacial, that is, the upper part of the glacier must have ex- 
tended over the regions in question, and that the mounds, or ridges,, 
were formed beneath the ice-sheet, the final liquefaction of which left 
