Norwich Bulletin Newspaper, January 1, 1917, Page 20

(Written Specially for The Bulletin.) T HAS BEEN THE HISTORY of this r&und ‘e ‘hich we toddle, since God created it “in the ng?” g - When was that far-off “Beginning ” What was the globe when it w first formed by Almighty fiat? What has it passed throug! since? What is the life-story of its physical changes since, “without form and void,” it began its development into a bhabitable sphere Why are the hills and the rocks and '.hz( alleys about Norwich unlike those near Hartford or New Haven® No wonder that most intellisent men and women and nearly all curicus minded voung people are fascinated by the mystery of this study. % Why are the mountains mountains? Why are the valleys valleys? Wy are there 1,026 lakes and 420 swamps mapped within the boundaries of little Connecticut, while in such larger states as Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Alabama not a single lake is shown by so careful and recent a cartography as that of the Century atlas? How did the rocks come { %e rocks, and how did the soil come to be soil 2 @Why should 1. - summit line of the hill ranges of all New Ensziand run in a gene:_ ! north-south direction? Why should some be rocky, with projecting ledges and sheer cliifs, while others are seemingly just mounds of dirt> Why are the rocks so different in look and feel and“hardness? Why are the so various, not only in aspect but in crop-producing qualities? In a sentenee, what has happened since that jmmeasurably distant to shape and fashion the earth we live on into its present condition Thaf is the question which geology asks itself and seeksgto answer. It is not an easy question. It is one which hundreds of sciectifically trained scholars and thousands of amateur students have been, <ing over for hundreds of years.® We are first to find gut what dirt is e of and how it is made; then what rocks are made of v they were made; how the rocks come to be so different in composition and texture and position; why Lantern Hill quartz white and shiny, hard enough to cut glass and sometimes shaped into beautiful pyramidal-pointed glassy c 5, while Portland building stone is brown and dull and formless and soft. 3 All through the sandstones and shales of the Connecticut are found fishes fiattened between the stones and them- ed to a sort of all through the same valley are in what is now hard rock the foot-prints of three- toed animais or huge birds; sometimes even the sinuous tracks of big worms, twisting angle-worm tracks are today seen to twist in the drying mud after a rain. How did they come there? I have seen in Nova Scotian cliffs. exposed by the thrashing of the ocean surf, the still standing upright stumps of big trees, ten or twelve feet high and two feet in dlameter, with their whole substance, wood, bark, knot-holes, etc., turned to stone. I have measured one, Iving prone on and imbedded in®the rocky beach, which extended eizhty feet in the portion exposed, and was at least three feet in diameter, with enough of its bark and branghes adhering to show that it had been a ‘fir, before it fell and Began being formed into stone. How did those trees come there? worl discoverable in the Helderbergs of neighboring New York whole moun- s are made up larzely of fossil shells/ Even the stone-walls the roadside are fuil Certain largely quarried build- tones of the Potomac region owe gheir beauty, when polished, to the fossil shells contained in them. How did they get there? , or even your own little back-garden. up of rounded pebbies and grayel; some Underneath them all, yow'll general- Take your own farr Some of the soil is made of sand: some of dark lo THE HOUSE ROCK, WATERFORD, 23 FEET HIGH AND 80 FEET IN CIRCUMFERENCE ly find a sub-soil of yellowish cast. Why is gravel unlike sand, and sand unlike loam, and loam unlike muck, and muck unlike clay? When you stop to think about it, don’t you see that every time you take a step, you're putting one foot or the other down upon tery which has been sealed since that awful “Be- ich is only now beginning to yield up some few of its secrets A mile or two from my home stands a noble elm-tree. Its huge swelling trunk bourgeons out, thirty or forty feet above the ground. into a wide-spreading and over-arching symmetry, so vast and so perfect that the modern dwelling-house which shelters under its shade seems like a toy compared with it. A gray-haired doctor of divinity who visits us summer times once said that he never passed that tree without feeling an instinctiye desire to take off his hat to it. But neither the size mor the beauty nor the majesty of any tyee can compare In wonder with the awe-inspiring mystery and marvel contained in any fragment of rock or any handful of earth upon which we daily set our feet unthinking. The oldest trec in the world is believed to have lived only some two or three thousand years. The splinter of one which you grind under your heel may well have seen more millions of vears than any tree has seen of minutes, anll have passed through changes greater even than the change which transforms wateg and soil into rootlets and leaves and towering trunks. Indeed, we ow less about the very few miles of crust which we are able to study than is desirable, either from the point of view of sclence or practical life. The study of the rocks as exposed by erosion, by river-cut- tings in deep y the strata pierced in mines, etc., has led geologists to put their history into four great eons, the Archacan, the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic. (These terms are ot half so jaw-bre and muddlesome as they look. “Ar- haean” means simply ancient, and is applied to the oldest rocks of ali, in which no least trace of organic life is found. “Paleo- zo0i¢” means old life, and is applied to those rocks which show the earliest forms of animal or vegetable life in fossils. “Meso- zoic” means middle life, and “Cenozoic” means recent life.) But it must not be tood that “recent life” as classed by geo- logists, means what we would call “recent” as measured by human history. “The lenzth of time since life first appeared on the earth is to be measured by tens of millions of years,” says Prof. Gregory. The beginning of even Cenozoic time was so far back that its eariier life is known to us only from fossilized forms. . king unde When we come down to our own local geology, that of Nor- vich and vicir st of Eastern Connecticut, we run up plump at one of the most puzzling ques- tions in the The only definite knowlédge we €an ob- tain as to th any particular formation is to be gained from the fossils contained in it. And, thus far, not a fossil nor a trace of one has ever been found in the rocks of this part of the state. There are rocks in other regions which contain no fossils, belonging to the Archaean system, the original rocks of the earth’s first erust, when life was impossible from the very nature of the environment. But our rocks show, by their “structure and composition and positio=, that very few if any of them can be classed as Archaean. There may be some but, ac- cording to Prof. Gregory, “there is little warrant for assuming eneral that the gneisses and granites of Connecticut represent £ the orizinal earth’s crust” In fact it seems to be as settled as anything in this regard ean be that the true granites are later formations than the other rocks. The Wester- ly sgranite, especially, which cuts westward through Mystic, Groton, Waterford and Millstone point, is officially described as “the youngest formation in the southeastern part of Connecticut.” There is no doubt, however, that most of the rocks maki up the Eastern Connecticut Highlinds—so-called to distinzuis ULLE a.-v&—'r mx«nm..'h-a Al A FIELD OF SCATTERED BOWLDERS IN NIANTIC WHICH SHOWS THE GLACIAL DRIFT —————— ———————————————————————————————————— e et e A e them from the much younger rocks of the Comnecticut Valley— are old, very old. While not of “Arcfaean,” they are certainly of “Paleozoic” age. They are chiefly gneisses and schists. Nine- tenths of what is popularly cailed granite is not really granite but gneiss. The two rocks often have practically the same com- position, but granite is massive, without signs of foliation .or lamination, while gneiss is full of streaks and more or less wavy lines or ribbons.. Granite is a stone porridge; gnciss a stone layer-cake. There are some areas of true granite in this part of the state, but “such areas are small, rarely more than half a mile in diameter,” says the state Bulletin on the Geology of Con- necticut. Says the same raport. further: “The nature of esc granite masses is not clear, but it is probable that they represent molten masses which were formed deep bemeath the surface, and which are now exposed only because the overlying rocks have bedn eroded to a great depth.” Most of the Eestern Connecticut rocks are gneisses and schists. And Dboth gneisses and schists are rocks made over by heat and pressure and othen forces from still older rocks. Ail that can be said with certainty about gneisses and schists is that they are. not original rocks. Whether they are original rocks made over just once, or whether the: represent the third or fourth or fortieth generation of rocks there is no telling. They were different rocks before they became gneisses and schists. How many times those former rocks had been ground down or melted up from still older rocks is not discoverablo. All we know is that there existed some other form of rock, deep under- ground, at least 29,000 and perhaps 50,000 feet down, and that the heat there, combined with the simply unimaginable pressure, so softened that pre-existing rock as to make it plastic if not semi-fiuid. That pre-existing rock might have been a lava flow or a sedimentary deposit. Whichever it was, under the joint action of subterranean heat and pressure “the criginal mifiéfals have been rearranged, #tretched and drawn out in lines; new minerals have been produced; parts have been fused and re-crystallized. In- stead of horizontal layers or uniform igneous masses we find twisted and broken rock with layers, bands and ribbon structures in every conceivable position. Moreover, this tangle of structure is further complicated by the presence of dikes, seams and veins which have made their way into the rock at different stages of its history.” So says the Connecticut geological report. It is “this very complesity of structure and composition” which gives force to the belief that the rocks showing it aré exceedinzly old, because it must have taken untofd millions of years for all this ruction to work out. And think of the still other untold millions it must have taken the mountain masses, perhaps rivalling the present Alps in hight and ruggedness, which once rose where the Quinebaug and Shetucket now flow, to be worn away to the present level! For it must be remembered that practically the entire contour Of the earth’s surface as we now see it is the result of denudation and erosion—the slow wearing away through incalculaBly long periods of time of the mountains which the earth’s wrinkling had, through other equally incalculable periods, slowly heaved up. There is no proof that the action gf rain and rivers and frost has been notably more rapid than at present, during past geologic periods. Yet by their inconceivably slow work, miles in depth of the globe’s surface have been eroded away till what we now call mountains in this part of the country are only the mere worn- down stumps of ranges that may once have over-topped the Matterhorn or Pike's Peak. Our own immediately local form of this made-over, twisted and contorted, secord or third-hand rock—the “Putnam gheiss is described as “quite unlike any other formation in the state.” It is “made up of bands of schist, gneiss, quartzite and igneous intrusions,” with occaslonal beds of limestone, sheets of pegmatite, layers of black granite-porphyry, etc. Nevertheless, the state geological report asserts unequivocally that it has been derived from simple sedimentary recks deposited in horizontal strata. Sedimentary rocks, it should be explained, are those which have been deposited by water as sediments. They are made up of muds, sands, graveis and ground-up shells, which, worn away from pre-existing rocks, have been laid down under water, then slowly sunk till under the combined action of heat and pressure they have been again cemented and pressed into sclid rock. Then, by the further action of heat and pressure, accompanied by no one knows what twisting and straining of the strata, by no one knows what earthquake shocks and voleanic outbursts and lava flows, these once level sedimentary rocks have been metamor- phosed out of recoznition. and snarled and tangled up into a heterogenous jumble which even the trained geologist can’t straighten out. If any local student of the rocks around Norwich feels dis- couraged because he can’t make them out or understand or place them, let him take fresh heart. Nobody can; at least nobody has, thus far. As Prof. Gregory says: “These rocks are like a shect of parchment on which writing after writing has been placed at different hands, without at any time completely erasing the previous inscriptions. Little wonder that we have difficulty in deciphering the original writing!” It is doubtful if the vividest imagination, rioting unchecked in & wild phantasmagoria of dreams, could picture anything so unlike the present as to equal the tremendous transformations which have alternately formed and deformed this land which we know so well. At one time sunk below the ocean’s bed; at an- other heaved up as the contracting globe wrinkled into mountain ridges; at one time a marshy plain over which lazy meandering rivers deposited vast beds of mud and sand and gravel; at an- other time an Alpine turmoil of jagged peaks piercing the sky- line; many times the scene of racking earthquakes, of up-welling lava flows, perhaps of actual voleanic outbursts—through all these and other eras it has passed as the infinitely slow aeons of geologic change have unfolded across the background of infinitely long time. * “There rolls' the deep where grew the tree. Oh earth, what changes thou hast secn! There where tlic long street roars, hath been The stiliness of the central seca. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.” Even when at last, after untold millions and miflions of ag the landwhad réached very nearly its present form and surface it had not. vot attained to quiet-and cessation of disturbance. 2 £ome time not so very long ago, as geologic eras are reckoned, some as yet unexplained atmospheric change brought the arctic goldness of the pole swinging down over all New England and the northern portion of thé present United States. With it came & great continental glacier, poriderously sweeping southwargd. over. Kill and mountain and velley and river, at least a thousand feet thick over ths southern edge of Connecticut, perlmps much thicker. It planed off the hills and buried the valleys under mu chiseled and grooved the surfaces of the rocks, dammed up ancient river dourses and forced them to seek channels; znd on its final limgering retreat northward left the whole land a horrible muddled waste of apparent hopelessness. That the surface shoula have rene into one capable of sustaining life in the comparativel 1sand years which have since elapsed, derfully recuperative forces of Nature. new Of the existence, the gencral extent, the main direction and the principal effects of this iremendous ice-mass there is fuller knowledge than of almost n the dim past which geologists seck to uncover. Any one who wishes to understand it can hardiy do better than read carefuily the admirable chapter on “Glacial Geclogy” by Prof .Gregory of Yale in the Connecticut Manual of Geology, shed by the state in 1305 as Public Docu- ment No. 47. In this chapter the problem and its solution are tersely but clearly and ade: r ted. I can here only sum- ma some of its leading cc ich was covered the world originally © earth’s crust have been subjected only to weathering, i. e, mospheric action, they have softened and decayed at the surface. In some parts of the south, this rotten X extends as much as fifty feet down before it merges into solid stone, When it does, the transition is gradual. And, in every casc, the soil above is shown in appearance and.composi- tion to be made from and cut of the same rock as that en which it now rests. In Connccticut and other areas over-ridden by the @wreat glacier, on the other hand, the soil usually fails to corre- spond in any scnse with the rock beneath. “Herc sandstone soil may cover granite ridges, and scil made of lava fracments may lie upon shales. In the Scuth, limestone ered with limestone scil and decompcsed sha i r of shale rocl * Neither weathering nor the action of rivers can expiain this fundamental difference the soil of Connecticut wh In the first place, i e unlike by the which made up the whole of t many states there isn't a single L ttle Cennecticut has cver a th stance, hasn't one, though its : al that of Connecticit. Weather, then doesn’t account for lakes. Lakes nare cotures of a landscape,” anyway. It doesn’t #ic time is reckoned to fill them up w sediment and increeping vegetat them, first into bogs, then into amps, then into grassed plai The fact that we have so many lakes is evidence that something happened, rathcr recently, to o modify the surface as to pro&e them. This is just what.the great giacier “When the glacier came down across New England from the north, it plowed oft the loose material from hill and valley alike, cutting deeply in some places, filling up other places. When it retreated it left material spread irreguiarly over the entire district.” All sorts of depressions had been scooped out: all sorts of dams dumped across river and brook courses. “Rain falling on such a surface did not find stream channels aiready established to carry it to the sea, but found disconnected depressions of various shapes and size: In localities not reached by the glacier such lakes xisted in the past have had time to dry up or drain themselves off. Ours 1 eventually do the same, but, while they remain, they furnish another evidence of the existence and work of the contiffenta] glacier. Again, much’ of the soil of this part of the state is what is known as “till.” Till is the material rubbed or torn off by a moving glacier, carried forward on it or within it or under it, and finally, on its retreat, left either jammed against the hills or spread over the hizhlands in “a compacted mass of unassorted and unstratified bowlders, pebbles and clay.” It is sometime called “hardpan,” and owes its stiffnessfo the incalculable weight of the ice which pressed it down. This till or hard-pan is utterly unlike the stratified drift which may be deposited by rivers, or the soil which may come from slow weathering of rocks. It can only be explained by giacial action. In some places this till was piled up and over-ridden by the glacier, making what are now quite sizable hills, generally of elliptical shape, running north and south, sometimes more than a quarter of a mile long and fifty to a hundred feet high. Such glacial hills are called ce biz enough to {cntucky, for in- rain-fall is heavier than map, 1 “HAYSTACK ROCK,” ON E. GEER'S FARM, LEBANON, 3 FEET HIGH; 89 FEET IN OIROUMFE‘RENOE _V ELATIONS! “arumlins” and are utterly unlike ordinary hills vertebrated by rock. P % Still another evidence of the glacier's work is found in the scratches, grooves, “dtriae,” which arc still visible on many ex- ““pesed rock surfaces, all pointing, no matter shere found, in the same general direction, a little cast of south. -1 have seen much grooves on smoothed ledge surfaces in Préstén and ‘on similar ‘surfaces along the Taconic ridges which bouni New England on the west. Both' wers manffestly due to the same cause; both r4n in practically the same direction. Beth must have been made by the same wide-spreading agency. As a gl r slowly but with irresistible power grinds its southward way, if tears off or picks up fragments of stone from Ipterfering lédges and freezes them solidly into its own mass. AS, in the sourse of its progress, it rides over some morc advanced ridge, it not only sweeps off that later ridge whatevem 10088 ‘material might have gathered on it, but thess imbedded stones ‘at {th own bottom, scraping forward over the clean-swept surface Below, inevitably scratch and groove it. The action is that of a mnmw. lane with an exceedingly irregular lower or cutting cdge. As & “nick” in the edge ofia carpénter’s wood-plane leaves its mark on the board he is working, so these {rregularities of the giacier's bot- tom leave their marks on the rounded. rock eminentes they grind over. But perhdps the strongest evidente and the most convincing testimony to the glacier’s existence and work is found'in the in- numerable bowlders scattered over every surface it covered, and especially numerous in Eastern Connectieut. These- bowlders, which range in size from common fleld stones to huge.rocks big- ger than barms, “lie in every conceivable positicn,.pn’ the tops of the highest hills, in the valleys, and on the hill slopes® . They are often, indced are generally of a different sort of Tock from that on which they rest. They could mot have been fored by any possible weathering; they are frequently too big to have been transported by any possible stream, Furthermore, they can often be traced back from the sites they now occupy to the ledges oft which they were torn and from which they were brought. “Sandstone bowlders from Cenlral Connecticut oceur at Mont- ville; dolomite bowlders from Oanaan are found in Litchfield; and bowlders occur at New Haven which have travelled from the Berkshire (Mass.) hills.” “They are far too heavy to have been carried by wind; and their weight and shapes make it unreason- able to suppose that they could have been deposited by water. The simplest explanation to account for them is that they were imbedded in the interior or were riding on the top of an ice- sheet; and, as the ice melted, they dropped down and came to rest wherever and in whatever position they might be when re- leased from the ice.” These ice-borne bowlders are unusually numerous throughout Eastern Connecticut. Some years ago, in the ogcasional holiday® of a busy working life, the writer of thi$ made photographs of nearly forty such bowlders within easy driving’distance of Nor- wich. They ranged in size from the mammoth “Cutchegan Rock” in Montville, which is 44 feet high and 218 in clrcumferencs, to some not much bigger than a hogshead but striking because of their position and appearance. Lack of time and proper facilities preyented the photographer from any attempt to trace them back to their parent ledges. In the case of several, such an attempt would be well worth whije for the amateur or student of glacial gcology residing near any of them or along the tracks they must have taken. Some of them doubtless, travelled considerable dis- tances before the ice relegsed them. Others may have been moved but a few miles, or éven less. Scratches and grooves on the surrounding fixed rocks, if any such can be found, would show the immediately local course along which the glacier moved THE LION BOWLDER, 17 FEET HIGH AND 53 FEET LONG SOCIETY, PRESTON, IN CIRCUMFERENCE In any case, as its general direction was almost invariably a little to the cast of south, search should tend a little to the west of north for the parent ledge or Cliff. The writer regrets that his field notes made at the time the photographs were taken, concerning the general composition of the bowlders pictured, have been mislaid or lost. It is quite pos- sible that some of the rocks photographed may not be true bowiders, but simply fragments of local rock, brought to their present prominence either by rolling down from some neighboring hight, or by the weathering away of softer strata around them. Twenty or more years ago, the late David A. Wells expressed some doubts as to “Cutchegan Rock,” long famed as “the biggest bowlder in the world,” being a trué ice-borne bowlder. Whether these doubts were valid, whether they have since been removed or added to, I do not know. The rock has been photographed many times and its general size and appearance are well-known, locaily. ) > “House Rock” at Waterford 1s a somewhat smaller bowlder though still rather too big to make an ornament for a lawn. When the photograph was taken it had only recently been made to serve as a sheiter by a band of wood-choppers. Its back was impervious to wind and its roof to rain. With a little walling in on one side, the cavity underneath it made a welcome retreat from storms, as well as a comfortable nook in which to explore the dinner-pail. While “House Rock” sits upon a ledgze and in a rather ele- vated situation, “Haystack Rock” on the Geer farm at Lebanon, which is a few feet taller and greater in girth, rests, as I remem- ber it, on lower land. The photograph, with thé humaf figure at its base, gives a fair idea of its size and shape, and illustrates how it took its name. There is a still smaller bowlder near Long Society, Preston, which I named “Lion Bowlder” from the semi-detached fragment on its top, in which a sufficiently active imagination can see some suggestion of the form of a couchant lion. This is near the road and very easily accessible. While these photographs represent single, detached bowlders, the picture of a fleld near Niantic illustrates the way in which smaller bowlders were dropped topsy-turvyly over wide areas. Many fields in Eastern CTonnecticut which are now cultivated were once as thickly sown with bowlders as this. They have been drawn away and built into fence walls or dumped into swales. Such fields as that shown, however, remain as un- answerable evidence of the work of the great ice-sheet. That tremendous mass of ice covered the whole land surface of Con- necticut and pushed across into the ocean. There its southward march was stayed. Long Island, which held by some to be really the terminal moraine dumped or dropped at its southern verge, was certainly its continenta] limit. It is reasonable to suppose that the ice-sheet was never so thick along this, Its southern border, as it was farther morth. Yet the ice of which ghis southern border was composed would have travellea farther and, naturally, have picked up more debris from the hills and mountains scored by its passage. Thus, as it slowly melted away and its southern edge reluctantly retreated northward, the spoll which it would drop along its retiring front would naturally be greater in amount and more varied in character. On ths whole, and just to give. this random talk a properly optimistic copclusion, let me suggest that, however “slow” and however: “lonesome” and however uncomfortable life in any corner of Eastern Connecticut may now seem' to some carping crities, 1¢ is, nevertheless, a muck nicér place to live in than it would have been when Paleozoic earth convulsions were heaving it_up into splintery Alpine peaks; or when Silurian earthquakes ‘were tossing it as tempests toss a shallow sea; or Devonian lava- or even a glacial era ovvr-mms it with mile ¥ A.P. H.