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One tenth of the surface of Ireland is said to be covered with peat, and small bogs abound in the drift-covered area of New England and the states lying as far west as the Missouri River. In Massachusetts alone it has been reckoned that there are fifteen billion cubic feet of peat, the largest bog occupying several thousand acres.
It also occurs in a bog near Sothern's Station on the stage road, where I first saw it, and in other similar bogs throughout the mountains hereabouts. The "Big Spring" of the Sacramento is about a mile and a half above Sisson's, issuing from the base of a drift-covered hill. It is lined with emerald algae and mosses, and shaded with alder, willow, and thorn bushes, which give it a fine setting.
In this way are formed the curious depressions in drift-covered regions called kettles or sinks. On these decaying glaciers we may also find many interesting lessons on the formation of boulders and boulder-beds, which in all glaciated countries exert a marked influence on scenery, health, and fruitfulness.
Thus where a region is underlain by sedimentary rocks, as is the drift-covered area from the Hudson River to the Missouri, the drift contains not only fragments of limestone, sandstone, and shale of local derivation, but also pebbles of many igneous and metamorphic rocks, such as granites, gneisses, schists, dike rocks, quartzites, and the quartz of mineral veins, whose nearest source is the Archean area of Canada and the states of our northern border.
Then, in dense obscurity, a tempest had howled and shrieked about us; now, in the unclouded sunshine, a gemmed and sparkling world revealed beauty everywhere. For a long distance our sleighs made the first tracks, and it seemed almost a pity to sully the purity of the white, drift-covered road. "What a lot of mud's hid under this snow!" was John Jones's prose over the opening vistas.
He had dug his opening straight out from the place which he had arranged for a door, and he now made it large enough to permit the passage of his body as he crawled upon hands and knees. The storm had in no degree abated. The velocity of the wind was so terrific that had Bobby not stood in the shelter of the drift-covered bowlder he could not have kept upon his feet.
Where the ice has retreated from the sea there is left a hummocky drift sheet with hollows filled with lakelets. These deposits help to explain similar hummocky regions of drift and similar plains of coarse, water-laid material often found in the drift-covered area of the northeastern United States. The sluggish glacier must do its work in a different way from the agile river.
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