In New England attention was first directed to kames in 1842, by President Edward Hitchcock, in a paper before the American Association of Geologists and Naturalists, describing the gravel ridges in Andover, Mass. In the accompanying plate is shown a portion of this kame system, which has a double interest to me from the fact that it was while living upon the banks of the Shawshin River, near where the kames and the river intersect, that I began, in 1874, my special study of glacial deposits. The Andover ridges are composed of imperfectly stratified water-worn material, and are very sharply defined, from the town of Chelsea, back from the coast into New Hampshire, for a distance of twenty-five miles. The base of the ridges does not maintain a uniform level, but the system descends into shallow valleys, and rises over elevations of one hundred to two hundred feet, without interruption. This indifference to slight changes of level is specially noticeable where the system crosses the Merrimac River, just above the city of Lawrence. It is also represented in the accompanying plate, where the base of the ridges in the immediate valley of the Shawshin is fifty feet lower than the base of those a short distance to the north, at the points marked _a_, _b_, and _c_. The ridges here terminate at the surface in a sharp angle, and are above their base forty-one feet at _a_, forty-nine feet at _b_, and ninety-one feet at _c_. Between _c_ and _b_ there is an extensive peat-swamp, filling the depression up to the level of an outlet through which the surplus water has found a passage. [Illustration: Fig. 31.--Longitudinal kames near Hingham, Massachusetts. The parallel ridges of gravel in the foreground run nearly east and west, and coalesce at each end, near the edges of the picture, to form an elongated kettle-hole. The ridges from fifty to sixty feet in height. The kame-stream was here evidently emptying into the ocean a few miles to the east (Bouvé).]