Green-Mountain freeman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1844-1884, 1881-04-20

1
toward something to come in future ages,
of which we can have no conception. But
had in mind, in commencing, q cOnelu-
sion in regard to the quality Of the soil as
to fertility. which naturally follows from
the facts that have been stated. 1t has
been gradually becoming more fertile from
natural causes, ami these causes are many
of them still in.operation; not uniformly
constantly, not at all times and places, but
without exceptions that impair the rule
The products of the soil were never before
nearly so great in quantity as in this age.
They were never before nearly so excel
lent in quality.
Nature has had and still has numerous
agents at work preparing the soil for the
nutrition of plants. The powerful agen.
cies that in former times produced some of
the marked changes in the surface of the
earth-that ground down mountains and
scooped out valleys, were the breaking up
plows. One of these, that may have helped
prepare the soil of Vermont for the food of
plants has been described by Prof. Seeye
as the Original Vermont Plow," meaning
the great glaciers that are supposed to
have moved down across the state from
the north, taking up and carrying great
fragments of rock, with small stones, clay,
sand and gravel, plowing. grinding and
crushing as it slowly moved with its under
surface borne down by the weight OF
several thousand feet of ice above. This
great plow, if it was a glacier of such
thickness, must have been blowing night
and day for several hundred years, as the
movement of Il glacier is slow That a
considerable portion OF the soil, gravel,
stones, clay and lopse material everything
the solid rock, has been moved from the
northward by some powerful agency, there
can be DO doubt. The evidence of it is
conspicuous on the hills in this vicinity,
where we may see the planished surface,
scratches and growing on the rocks, with
numerous rounded boulder5 of different
character from the rock over which they
rest. and frequently entirely different from
any rock, in place. in the neighborhood.
Two examples occurring near Us, may
be mentioned. In building the narrow
guage railroad, boulder found about
three miles below this village was cut up
and used in making cuvert. 1t was
| about ten feet in length, composed of a
peculiar green granite, very compact and
uniform in structure and entirely different
from any granite found in this section.
| Another large rounded boulder about ten
! feet in diameter, that might have been
seen from the travelled road between this
place and Fayetteville lying within few
feet of the railroad track was also cut up
and used in building "A culvert. 1t was :.
coarse gray granite containing hattened
nodues of mca-a rather poor specimen
of rare kind of granite of great interest
to geologists. This boulder, like the 9th
er, must have been taken from its original
place and brought from Il considerable
distance, as no granire of the same kind is
very near On the hill, seven or eight
hundred feet above the place where these
boulders laid, may be seen scratches and
grooves in the rocks-marks of the drift.
Different theories have been advanced
by geologists in accounting for these
phenomena; but all agree that ice, either
in the form of glaciers or icebergs, must
have been the principal cause. Agassiz
maintained the theory that an immense
glacier or sea of ice of sufficient depth to
fill all the valleys and to cover all the
mountains, moved down from the polar
regions across the continent. This sea OF
ice he estimates to have been, in northern
New England, two or three miles in depth.
Ii we Imagine IL mass of solid ice reaching
upward len thousand feet above the surface
where this village now stands, and cover
ing the country, it seems wide step to
the tropical climate that the character OF
| fossils found in Vermont and other north
ern states indicate once existed. Among
them are the fossil elephant exhumed al
Mt. Holly in making Il cut for the railroad
the huge animal dug up at Cohoes, N. Y.
and now preserved in the state collection
at the agricultural rooms in Albany. and
the fossil of the mastodon found at New.
burgh, in the same state. These, with other:
that have been dug up in various paris of
the northern states, were found not far be-
low the surface, indicating that the tropca
climate occurred after the ice or glaciers
that produced the drift
The wonderful changes that have been
wrought on the earth's surface within a
comparatively recent time-as the geolo
gst reckons time-have some striking
illustrations in several of the towns o
Windham county. The beds of severa
ancient streams or rivers are found on Of
near the summit of high hills, on dry land
far from any brook or rill. On hill in
the west part of Newfane, and on another
hill in the south part of Wardsboro, and
again near the summit of a mountain in
Stratton, the beds of ancient rivers or large
streams are shown by the deep pot holes
worn IN the solid rocks. The banks of these
ancient streams, with the surrounding hills
that enclosed them, may have been worn
away by abrasion, or the gradual erosion
of their surfaces, thus converting the solid
rocks into food for plants. Nature is con-
stantly pulverizing the soil, by both
mechanical and chemical forces. and
fitting it for the nutriment of plants. The
earth, fitted first by such agencies for the
growth of plants, has received all vegeta-
tion back to itself, perhaps with interest
drawn from the atmosphere, for thousands
of ages. Is there not progressive fertility
| in the soil? Look back to the solid crust
of the earth that bore no plant and fed no
animal. From this beginning, through
innumerable ages, the surface of the earth
has been in course of preparation for what
we now behold,-man, the fields of grain
the profusion of flowers and fruit, the
beauty of the landscape, the cattle feeding
on thousand hills. Who can tell us when
this progressive force or apparent law OF
nature, which was never more active than
in 1881, will ceaseP