218 BOULDERS IN NEW YORK—GOLD SAND OF SOUTH AMERICA. 
Philadelphia, in his account of the mineral waters of Ballaston and 
Saratoga, in the state of New York, about 200 miles north of that 
city, states, “ That the surface of the ground, which is here composed 
of shale and limestone, is covered with large insulated masses of 
stone, commonly called boulders, consisting of large blocks of quartz, 
and rolled masses of other primitive rocks. These (he adds) must 
have been transmitted from the neighbouring mountains, as they are 
not attached to the rocks in situ, and have no connexion with them : 
they are found in every country, and only prove the action of an 
extensive flood of waters.’" 
In tlvis dispersion of blocks of granite and beds of gravel in 
North America, we have evidence of a debacle by the diluvian 
waters in the western hemisphere, analogous to that we have been 
examining in Europe ; and the presence of the bones of elephants, 
and other animals which are common to the gravel of both con¬ 
tinents, shows that the time of its formation was in each case the 
same. 
In South America the sand and gravel in which they find the 
tin of Mexico, and such extensive deposits of grains of gold and 
precious stones, are composed of the diluvial wreck of mountains, 
in which, as their matrix, these minerals were once imbedded, and 
where they would have remained to the present hour, had they not 
been broken down and reduced to sand and gravel by the same 
diluvial waters that have in a similar manner overspread Europe 
with the detritus of its own mountains. I have already mentioned 
metalliferous examples of this detritus in the stream tin ore of Corn¬ 
wall, and the lead ore that is similarly circumstanced in the Vale of 
