636 
GEOLOGY OF THE FIRST DISTRICT. 
I have been much interested in the examination of the locality of this slide. The earth has 
cracked and crumbled, and slid down until a great part of the depth of the gulf between the 
hill and the mass that has partly slidden down is filled up. It is still, perhaps, fifty feet deep. 
The materials are almost every day sliding down in small masses into this chasm. Many 
cracks may be seen on the hill-side south of the slide, where the earth has settled a few 
inches to a foot; and there is a strong probability of a slide occurring there at any time, though 
more probably in the winter. The ground from which the slides have occurred shows an area 
of four or five acres, from which the earth has more or less slidden down, and is encircled 
by a vertical cliff of gravel and sand beds twenty to forty feet high, and a slope of debris of 
seventy to eighty more, below which the clay and gravel hills of the slidden earth begin and 
extend near three hundred yards. 
The portion of the hill north of the slide will now be more likely to slip than it was, since 
it has no longer any support on the south, and it seems to have settled some years ago several 
feet. Should this mass be undermined by digging, it will almost certainly slip. Great 
destruction would ensue, as the streets below are densely settled. 
Bones of the Mastodon. 
Bones of this animal are now (September 16th, 1843) being disinterred from the marl 
underlying peat in a marsh in Orange county. The bones of this animal and the fossil 
elephant are very common in the peat bogs of Orange and Ulster. They can be found by 
using a long iron rod, and thrusting it down through the peat. A person will readily learn to 
distinguish by the/eeZ, when the rod strikes a log, a rock, a bone, or gravel or sand. 
Supplementary Remarks on the Drift. 
Since the last of the manuscript of this volume was handed to the publishers, I have first 
seen the volume containing the “ Transactions of the Association of American Geologists 
and in that, in the memoir on drift, by Prof. Hitchcock, is the following paragraph : 
“ Mr. M‘Laren has recently suggested an ingenious amalgamation of the iceberg theory of 
Mr. Lyell, with the glazier theory of Agassiz. He has rendered it very probable, that if 
most of the present continents of the globe were beneath the ocean, there would exist a broad 
westerly current between the tropics, and two easterly currents between the tropics and the 
poles. Such he supposes to have been the state of the northern hemisphere during the glacial 
period. He also supposes with Agassiz, that during the same time there was a vast accu¬ 
mulation of ice around the north pole ; which, upon the return of heat, would send olf currents 
southerly; and these meeting with the easterly currents, the result would be a current com¬ 
pounded of the two forces ; that is, a southerly one, the very direction that seems to have 
been generally taken by drift over the whole northern hemisphere.”* 
• Transactions of the Association of American Geologists, 1843, p. 218. 
