Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

[447] at once to certain points of resemblance between the phenomena there and those which I had seen in the neighborhood of Boston. Since then, we have made several excursions together, have visited Niagara, and, in short, have tried to collect all the special facts of glacial phenomena in America. . . . You are, no doubt, aware that the whole rocky surface of the ground here is polished. I do not think that anywhere in the world there exist polished and rounded rocks in better preservation or on a larger scale. Here, as elsewhere, erratic debris are scattered over these surfaces, scratched pebbles impacted in mud, forming unstratified masses mixed with and covered by large erratic boulders, more or less furrowed or scratched, the upper ones being usually angular and without marks. The absence of moraines, properly so-called, in a country so little broken, is not surprising; I have, however, seen very distinct ones in some valleys of the White Mountains and in Vermont. Up to this time there had been nothing very new in the aspect of the phenomena as a whole; but on examining attentively the internal arrangement of all these materials, especially in the neighborhood of the sea, one