The City of New York now embraces four separate, though from a geological view not distinct, areas, viz., The
Borough of Manhattan (Manhattan Island), the Borough of the Bronx, the
Borough of Richmond (Staten Island) and the Boroughs of Brooklyn and
Queens (Brooklyn, Jamaica, Flat-bush and Long Island City). Of these,
the Borough of Manhattan and the Borough of the Bronx have a common
geological expression; the Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are
identical in geological character, and carry to its most typical limit
the drift area so largely reduced on Manhattan Island by municipal
changes, while the Borough of Richmond bears an individual geological
structure involving peculiar features not observed in the others.
In
geological affinities, if the term may be used, Manhattan and the Bronx
are allied to northern or primordial, even ar-chaean structures;
Richmond, Kings, and Queens to southern and recent, though, indeed, in
Richmond there is a problematical nucleus similar to those of
Manhattan Island.
In
view of this diversity of feature, the discussion of the topographical
conditions and the geological nature of the City of New York will
naturally fall into three sections; first, that of Manhattan Island,
with an appendix embracing briefly the similar construction of the
Borough of the Bronx; second, that of Brooklyn and Queens, and, third,
that of Richmond.
TOPOGRAPHY
Manhattan
Island, the original nucleus of the present enlarged city, is an
irregular rectangle, bounded on the northwest by the Hudson River, on
the north by Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Harlem River, on the east by
the Harlem and
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