134 
GEOLOGY OF THE FIRST DISTRICT. 
Easthampton ; and many other parts too numerous to mention. On Staten island, also, the 
south and southwest parts are loose sand. 
The clay lands of the same formation occupy the valley of the Champlain canal, to Fort- 
Edward and Fort-Miller on the Hudson ; also a part of Argyle up the valley of the Moses 
kill, and the west and southwest parts of Easton in Washington county. It also occupies the 
west part of Scaghticoke, Berwick, Greenbush and Schodack in Rensselaer county ; narrow 
belts near the Hudson, to Fishkill and Newburgh ; along the Mohawk in Schenectady county ; 
and in Albany county, belts more or less broad along the Mohawk, and up the valleys of the 
Norman’s kill, Vlamman’s creek, and Coeyman’s creek. Where the sand occurs, it is uni¬ 
formly above the clay beds, and generally covers the plains that divide the waters of the 
creeks and smaller streams. 
The thickness and elevation have been already slightly alluded to in the introductory re¬ 
marks on the quaternary formation. I have no data to give the exact height to which this 
formation attains, except in a few localities, but it is supposed that it does not, at any point in 
the Hudson valley, attain an elevation of more than five hundred feet above tide water. The 
strata are nearly horizontal, or if inclined, the dip is insensible to the eye. It overlies the slates, 
limestones, grit and other rocks unconformably, except some localities along the western bases 
of the Helderberg and Kayaderosseras mountains, and on the Mohawk, where the rocks are 
nearly horizontal. 
Mr. Disbrow bored for water for the Water-works Company in 1825, on very high ground 
in the rear of the Capitol at Albany. He bored one hundred and twenty feet through clay to 
the hardpan. In another well for the same company in Albany, locality not specified, he 
bored through twenty feet of clay, sand and gravel, and seventeen feet of hardpan, when water 
overflowed from the surface at the rate of five gallons per minute. At Boyd and McCulloch’s 
brewery, he began in a well thirty feet deep, which was probably through clay, and twenty 
feet above tide. The following is the section to the rock : 
Clay?. 30 feet. 
Coarse gravel and hardpan,. 11 “ 
Black slate.* 
At Hudson, at seventy feet above tide water, the following section was obtained in boring 
a well, viz: 
Clay,. 
Sand,. 
. 40 “ 
1 Quaternary. 
Hardpan,. 
. 30 “ 
\ Drift. 
Gravel,. 
Slate rock, 70 feet.* 
. 4 “ 
At New-York, a well for the Manhattan Company; level forty feet above tide : 
Sand and gravel to granite,. 40 feet. 
Bored into granite,. 240 “ 
Silliman's Journal, Vol. 12, p. 139. 
