Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/213

Rh huge mass of granite should have resisted the pressure of a great ice-sheet, and remained so prominently in place as part of a vein, when such pressure and an accompanying movement and grinding were sufficient to not only round off and obliterate everything like angularity from the granite surface, but also remove or reduce down to a much lower level and over a large proximate area the whole vast mass of rock on which the granite protuberance, if it be a portion of a vein, must have been as it were originally imbedded, is, as Prof. Crosby admits, a result not a little singular. There is certainly nothing analogous to such a phenomenon in the vicinity, and it may well be questioned whether there is anything similar anywhere.

Furthermore, as throwing some light on this subject, there are, as before stated, in comparative proximity to the "Sheegan" Rock, a large number of undoubted bowlders of the same granite, which, though not comparable as regards size, may yet be regarded as extraordinary, and as clearly involving the exercise of an enormous disrupting and transporting power within a rather limited area. One of these bowlders in the same township of Montville, which is also an object of public curiosity, and known as the "Goal" Rock, is, according to measurements made for the writer, twenty-one feet high, twenty-five long, and twenty-five thick. Another, in the vicinity of Gardner's Lake, from which nearly one fourth of the original mass has been detached in fragments, is reported as eighteen feet six inches high, thirty-five feet long, and twenty feet thick. A third, on the east side of the Thames River, in the town of Preston, is fourteen feet high, twenty feet long, and seventeen feet thick; and at least three or four others in the same region, of similar dimensions, might be enumerated. Above a mile east of "Allen's Point," and on one of the highest of the elevations bordering the river, an area of several acres is so covered with huge bowlders that in places it is difficult to find a path through them; while the southern slope of the same elevation, not far removed, is so strewed with such a multitude of rounded, small bowlders that they have the appearance of having been planted artificially.

Fig. 5 represents an extremely picturesque though not a very large bowlder, on the road between Norwich and Taftville, on the lands of the Ponemah Manufacturing Company, and almost in the center of the village that has within a comparatively few years grown up about it; and which, most fortunately, has thus far been carefully protected by the company against the Vandalic spirit which is so often prompted to mutilate or destroy everything in the nature of a public curiosity.