Anyone who drives westward on the Jacob’s Ladder route from Springfield passes first through the open, rolling country of the Connecticut Lowland. Hills are in sight, but they seem remote until he leaves Westfield, and there the upland rises before him like a 900-foot wall. The road uses the gateway cut in the wall by the Westfield River, and the drive westward towards the headwaters of the river is one of the best known scenic attractions in western Massachusetts. But a greater treat awaits the person who will venture southward on the road along the Little Westfield River. It follows the canyon brink about 500 feet above the stream. Near the hilltop, a side road turns north to the Westfield Marble quarry, which provides a vantage point overlooking fifty miles of country to the north, east and south. The Westfield River meanders eastward across the flat lowland. Its banks are terraced, each level cut in the lake beds or in the delta which the river built in glacial Lake Springfield. The scalloped margins of the terraces are the extremities of meander loops which developed when the river was not entrenched as deeply in the unconsolidated deposits as it is today. The flatness of the twenty-mile strip of lowland is impressive, for it ends only at the Wilbraham Mountains, eight miles east of Springfield. Beneath the lowland lie soft and gently dipping sandstones and sandy shales, capped by a thin veneer of lake clays and river sands. The shales are the youngest Triassic beds remaining in the region, and they outcrop between Thompsonville and Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Younger shales above them succumbed to Tertiary erosion. The Wilbraham Mountains are granite and gneiss which formed the roots of the ancient Triassic ranges. Their present accordant summits are a tribute to the leveling activities which running water performed on a quiescent land, whereas the deep V-shaped valleys incised in the level summits record uplift and quickened erosion in Tertiary and glacial time. Indeed, the lowland itself owes its existence to the power of rejuvenated streams working on non-resisting rocks. The Holyoke and Mount Tom ranges are visible far to the northeast, and a chain of low hills connects Tom with the ridges between Hartford and Avon, Connecticut. These linear hills surmount the lowland because they are made of basaltic lava, which is better able to resist the rain and the weather than the sandstones and shales above and below. Scattered flat-topped hills between Southwick and Granby are sheets of basalt-like rock called diabase, which was inserted between a sandstone roof and floor. Nowhere can one better appreciate the highly individualized imprint which each geological element has made upon the central New England landscape. _The Old Lead Mines_