The first and oldest ingredients in the central design are entirely red. The materials are fragments of older rocks—granite and gneiss, schist and pegmatite, feldspar and quartz. They are invariably coarse, for every layer of inwashed sediment has pieces over an eighth of an inch in diameter, and only the coarser particles were smoothed. The finer particles were not moved about enough to have their sharp corners worn away. The pebbles and clay in the thick layers of conglomerate at the French King Bridge were dropped by rushing, overloaded torrents deploying on a lowland—a situation not unlike the one at Townshend, Vermont, during the hurricane deluge. Only fine debris was transported across the fans to the far side of the basin. The western hills made small contributions of sediment; but their streams brought particles which never exceeded an inch in diameter, and in quantities so moderate that the fragments underwent some sorting and sizing as they were spread over the lowland. From the very start the valley was deeper near the east wall than the west; and the eastern mountain block was greatly elevated, whereas the western block was simply a hilly upland. [Illustration: Fig. 11. _Map of the old volcanic region near Mount Hitchcock and west of the Notch._] The edge of the eastern mountain mass is located at the French King Bridge and passes half a mile west of Montague. Its location beneath the younger fill is known less perfectly farther south, but it seems to extend through Amherst, certainly west of South Amherst and Granby and probably east of the Notch. At least two mountains rose above the ancient lowland floor; the northern one is a long ridge of schist between Bernardston and Mount Hermon, and the other is Mount Warner. Mount Warner is an island of highland rocks in a sea of red sandstone fill. The Bernardston ridge resembles a peninsula in somewhat analogous sedimentary surroundings. The two eminences reveal the form of the valley floor and the western hills at the dawn of the Triassic period, for they were spared from destruction by burial, until deep erosion exposed them again in Miocene time. _Hot Springs in Central Massachusetts_