3H0 llie American Geuloyist. November, 1896 
gin. It was said that his Satanic majesty, whose home it seems was 
on Long Island, had ventured over to the mainland at a place known as 
the "stepping stones." Having got in trouble with the spirits on the 
opposite side of the sound, he was forced to i-etreat: and, in order to 
have revenge, he gathered together all the stones he could tind in the 
Coram hills, determined to hurl them at the heads of the i)rimitive 
yankeen on the opposite shore. It seems that the Evil One, however, 
failed to expend all of his ammunition, much of it having been left all 
along the north side of the island. The legend would account equally 
well for the scarcity of erratics on the side fronting the ocean. 
It was natural, also, for early writers on the formation of the island 
to conjecture that, during some convulsion of nature, this small frag- 
ment of the American continent slid off from the mainland, as this little 
isle by the sea is chiefly composed of debris brought here from the re- 
gions north of the sound. 
In my walk along the beach to the Canoe Place canal, I had time to 
examine the face of the bluff. The formations were somewhat ob- 
scured by washings from the clay deposit above : but it was easily seen 
that nearly the whole bluff, some fifty feet in hight. is composed of 
stratified sand and gravel with some thin layers of laminated clays. In 
previous papers published in the Amkkican Gkologist, I have called 
attention to the fact that, wherever the glacial floods were great, the 
material in consequence was carried farther southward, so here at 
Good Ground, where the moraine is much broken and indented by 
these old river channels, the marginal kames become quite prominent 
and run out as far south as the Shinnecock bay. Even the moraine 
proper, as we have noted, is very fluvial in character. 
The Canoe Place depression nearly cuts the island in two. The Pe- 
conic and Shinnecock bays were doubtless at one time connected, and 
this connection has been restored by artificial means, a canal having 
been constructed across the narrow isthmus. A little further east, an- 
other arm of the Peconic bay stretches out towards Southampton, and 
between these two arms are embi'aced the Shinnccoclt liills. These 
are really marginal kames without the moraines. The till is very light 
and the soil therefore not so fertile as tliat of Good Ground, where the 
main morainic belt or "l)ack bone" of this island has l)een more fully 
preserved. 
The farmers of the south side of Long Island have learned, without 
knowing the cause, that the nearer they get to the ridge— the terminal 
moraine— the more fruitful is the soil. Of course glacialists will under- 
stand why this is so, as in general the glaciated portion is more pro- 
ductive than the unglaciated. 
The region of the Shinnecock hills is full of interest, and it is worthy 
of note that the late Prof. James D. Dana, not long before his death, 
found the key that seems to unlock some of the mysteries of this won- 
der-land.* In a paper on Long Island sound in the Quaternary era, he 
*Am. Journal of Science, third series, vol. 40, p. 426. 
