Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
In journeying up the Delaware and approaching Trenton, we have passed
through a region of most interesting geological development. All along
are evidences of the deposit of the drift from above, which is
popularly known as the "Trenton gravel." The Delaware flows southeast
from the Kittatinny Water Gap to Bordentown, and then, impinging
against the cretaceous stratified rocks of New Jersey, abruptly turns
around a right-angled bend and goes off southwestward towards
Philadelphia. The river has thus deposited the Trenton gravels,
composed of the drift of most of the geological formations in its
upper waters, throughout its course, on the Pennsylvania side from
Trenton down below Philadelphia. This deposit is fifty feet deep on
the river bank in Philadelphia, and underlies the river bed for nearly
a hundred feet in depth. At Bristol the deposit stretches two miles
back from the river, and at Trenton it is almost universal. The
material, which in the lower reaches is generally fine, grows coarser
as the river is ascended, until at Trenton immense boulders are often
found imbedded. We are told by geologists that at the time of the
great flood in the river which deposited the gravel, the lower part of
Philadelphia, the whole of Bristol and Penn's Neck and almost all
Trenton were under water. The gravel has disclosed bones of Arctic
animals--walrus, reindeer and mastodon--and also traces of ancient
mankind. The latter have been found at Trenton and on Neshaminy Creek,
indicating the presence of a race of men said to have lived about
seven thousand years ago. The river has also made immense clay
deposits all along, which was done at a time when the water flowed at
a level more than a hundred feet higher than now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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