12 The American Geologist. January, i904. 
more plentiful than in and on the adjoining- smoother tracts of 
till throughout this region. 
An area of 2,000 to 2,500 square miles may be expected to be 
mapped inside the circuit of this Bethlehem moraine, as it may 
be named, reaching perhaps south to Center Harbor, and prob- 
ably east into Maine. It was the latest moraine belt of the 
broad or continental type in the United States, unless some 
moraine of the same kind and of the same age, or more recent, 
may surround a part of the Adirondack mountains or a part 
of central Maine culminating in Mt. Katahdin. 
When the icefields were still more reduced, shrinking to 
form separate glaciers in the valleys and ravines of the great 
mountain ranges, their departure seems probably to have been 
more rapid than in the case of the last remnants of the British 
ice-sheet, with fewer pauses allowing opportunity for the form- 
ation of characteristic narrow valley moraines, like those of 
Ben Nevis and Scawfell. Such moraines I saw only near the 
old White Mountain House, within 20 to 30 rods north and 
west from it, about one mile west of the Fabyan House. These 
little ridges of drift, parallel and four or five in number, well 
strewn with boulders, rise 5 to 10 feet above the nearly level 
ground, and extend from north to south, transverse to the 
Ammonoosuc valley, at its northern side. Other valley mo- 
raines were looked for, but were nowhere seen, in the distance 
of about six miles eastward to the foot of the steep west side 
of Mt. Washington, where it is ascended by the railway. 
A re-entrant angle of the remnant of the ice-sheet when it 
was forming the Bethlehem moraine, having its apex near the 
Twin Mountain House, probably permitted the ice front to turn 
thence northward along the west side of Cherry mountain. In 
the later glacial recession, the same indentation of the ice bor- 
.der, retreating to the east and southeast, caused a very inter- 
esting esker series,* partly complex and partly a single conspic- 
uous ridge, to be extended nearly along the center of the Am- 
monoosuc valley for the distance of four miles between the 
Twin Mountain and Fabyan houses, and for at least a mile and 
a half farther to the east and south. Large portions of the es- 
ker, if it was originally continuous, have been eroded by the 
• First described by me, for its southeastern half, in Geology of N. H., vol. 
iii, p. 62, 1878. 
