grit " wanderer," whose absolute irrelevancy to its surroundings was shown in the fossils it revealed.
A
surface survey seems to show that the trap boulders and, indeed,
boulders of all sorts are numerically greater on the north shore of
Staten Island than through its interior region or south of its hills.
The backs and flanks of the morainal hillocks do not display so
noticeable a collection, nor anywhere is the sprinkling of large masses
of angular and transported rocks as striking. Taken in connection with
the admitted lower level of the continent in glacial days, they
strongly impress the observer as ice-raft or iceberg transported
fragments.
Such
less frequent stones as contained fossils were examined by members of
the Natural Science Association, and they proved their derivation from
the sedimentary rocks of the north and west. The Potsdam sandstone, the
Hudson River shales and slates, the Lower Helderberg limestones, the
Oris-kany and Schoharie grits, the Hamilton shaly limestone, and the
Upper Helderberg had representatives among these alien masses, and the
most skeptical would not withstand such indubitable evidence of
removal and transference.
A
stone fence or stoned gutter or a curb would often tell the observant
pedestrian many instructive facts. I recall on Staten Island such a
spot, the boulder-paved curb and gutter of a pleasant villa on the brow
of the hill at Pleasant Plains, wherein granite and granitoid gneisses,
quartzites, traps, and sandstones mutely proclaimed their foreign
extraction. Indeed, looking at this array of "sermons in stones," the
impression of wonder grew as the utterly foreign nature of most of
these " erratics " became more conspicuous by contemplation. Some of
the granites came possibly from New York Island, but many were
characteristic highland rocks, the hornblende gneissic granites which
have been so well characterized by Britton and Merrill as the
unmistakable nucleus of the highlands were here present. Here also
were granulites or mix-
