History of the Origin of the Town of Clinton, Massachusetts, 1653-1865 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. SCIENTIFIC NOTES. The student of nature, unsatisfied with the outline of the physical geography of the town, may wish to inquire more closely into the work of natural forces in the past. Such a student can find in the surface rocks of Clinton no record of any time earlier than the Carboniferous Age, save in the hornblende-schist in the southeast corner of the town. Near the beginning of this age, untold centuries ago, the quartzite rock which appears in the eastern ledges of Harris and Burditt Hills, was deposited by a vast body of water, reaching from New Hampshire through Massachusetts, towards Connecticut and Rhode Island. Here, the water must have been at least several miles in breadth, as this same bed of quartzite appears again far to the west of Clinton limits. This quartzite, which often shows the structure of conglomerate, was deposited in the form of sand, with occasional layers of small pebbles, but as the movement of the water became retarded, the sediment was deposited in the finer form of clay. Layer by layer through long periods of geologic time, this clay grew to a great thickness. In certain places, like the present top of Burditt Hill, the water sank, or the land rose, so that portions of the clay bed appeared as morasses, or swamps, which supported the vegetation characteristic of the age. The remains of this vegetation are still found in the mixture of anthracite and graphite which occurs in the slate, made from the clay. GEOLOGY OF THE ROCKS. 21 While the structure of these rocks and their composition show that they are formed of sand and clay deposited from water, while their position in their relations to other rocks gives evidence of the time of their deposit, while the shape of the bed proves much regarding the shape and size of...