USA > New Jersey > Scheyichbi and the strand : or, early days along the Delaware ; with an account of recent events at Sea Grove ; containing sketches of the romantic adventures of the pioneer colonists ; the wonderful origin of American society and civilization > Part 12
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14
The Tertiary formation covers all the surface of Southern New Jersey south of the line from Shark River Inlet to Alloway's Creek, except a narrow margin of recent formation along the shores. Owing to the nature of their materials, and the agencies which have operated upon them through successive ages, it is very difficult to definitely outline the field of these two formations. The Tertiary overlies the Cretaceous in the north, and runs irregularly into the recent formation along the shore.
Beyond the Cretaceous, to the north, appears the Triassic formation, composed of the red sandstones and others, the trap and conglomerate rocks.
North of the Triassic rise the mountains which stretch across the State of New Jersey in its northwestern portion. These mountains are composed of gneiss rocks and crystalline limestone, or marble, but mostly of gneiss; these are the outcrop of the metamorphic rocks of the Azoic time, and are metamorphic, igneous, or primitive in character, -that is to say, they are geologically the most ancient rocks, and owe their character to the action of fire. The valleys among these mount- ains are limestone localities, and all the territory of New Jersey beyond 'the mountains to the northwest is a limestone region, and of the Paleozoic division of geologic structure and time.
§ It being known that the metamorphic rocks of the Azoic period are primitive, igneous, or Plutonic rocks, it is understood that they are the oldest, and, if retained in place, would be the deepest buried, of all the
96
SCHEYICHBI AND THE STRAND.
strata, lying as an ever-shrinking shell of granite upon the fiery lava which forms the liquid pulpy heart of the globe. All the strata, were they " in place," would be piled one on another above this heated granite floor. First would come the Azoic or Metamorphic rocks; then the Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permean, Triassic, Jurassic, Creta- ceous, Tertiary, Post-Tertiary ; and last and uppermost of all, the Recent formations.
This would place Southern New Jersey geologically where some of its residents declare it is to be found in every respect,-"at the top of the heap;" but, since the central fire of the planet first began to cool, and islands of red-hot stone floated upon the incandescent ocean, there has been many a commotion and violent shaking-up of things in this world, and geologists are not the only people who, in order to learn the truth, are compelled to follow with painstaking care the clue of fact through what seems a labyrinth of confusion before they catch a view of the system of nature, comprehend in part the laws of the universe, and realize with reverence the glory of. the Infinite God !
The geologic strata are first formed, and then upheaved or depressed, crushed, crumpled, and distorted, disintegrated, mixed, and distributed, in a thousand ways and positions, by the action of known but incon- ceivable forces. The shrinkage of the earth's crust crowds up enormous ridges of granite or other rocks, which in cragged wedges slowly pierce upwards through the superincumbent mass, or else the crash of earth- quake explosions produces effects in a few moments otherwise the work of ages. The variations of condition and character thus introduced in the geologic elements by the causes described create an appearance of utter confusion bewildering to the uninformed and heedless. It seems to the superficial observer that the rocks and earths, the sands and the soils, are jumbled together without sequence or significance, and such persons, if induced to consider the subject at all, are inclined to surren- der the use of their senses and reason, and atone for their imbecility and unfaithfulness by the acceptance of some superstitious, heathenish, and wicked pretension of a revealed Cosmogony. Thus they give up the study, appalled by the difficulties which surround it, content to know no more scientifically of the wondrous world they mysteriously inhabit than did the saurian reptiles whose fossil remains enrich the marl beds and banks of fossil shells. Such a course is blindly impious, and dis- graceful to human nature.
It is true the Bible asserts that God made the world, but it gives only the most exceeding vague intimation as to how or when the Creation announced was effected; whatever may or may not be re- vealed in spiritual things, we are left to study geology hammer in hand, knocking hard at the rocky doors of science. Yet we need not be dis- couraged nor afraid; the difficult is not of necessity impossible, and although geology is an infant science compared to astronomy and
97
SCIENCE AND TRUTH.
mathematics, and only a child beside even chemistry, yet the clue has been discovered, the system made plain, and only diligence and cour- age are required for the conquests of the future. The practical eco- nomic value of geology is immense, and besides, it must ever be a high gratification to read in the record of the rocks the history of the evo- lution and progressive development of our home, the earth.
There is no danger the facts of Geology can annul, or even obscure, the truth of religion. Men of science are not always scientific, but while we trace the process by which that which is has been brought about, it need not be that we become process mad, and unable to see in and behind the unfolding the INFINITE SPIRIT, which moves in the wheels of existence. Here, are phenomena ; there, is law, process, and evolution ; THE SPIRIT is everywhere, all in all. There is no pebble so small but law constrains it, no material so inert but evolution compels its progress ; the smallest grain of sand has being in an infinite order ; omnipotence overtops the loftiest crag, underlies the deepest primitive strata, and sustains the central fire. Facts cannot disprove TRUTH; the idea of God science can displace from the minds of candid and tho- rough students is but the myth of morbid imagination, the shadow of the fetich of barbarian ignorance.
§ New Jersey contains the out-crops of all the geologic formations except, unfortunately, the carboniferous. In the absence of the coal- bearing strata there are, however, other rich and rare mines and de- posits in the State, notably those of zinc; as well as an abundance of iron, of lime, of valuable clays, of building materials, and natural fer- tilizers. The remarkable geologic characteristics which have marked the region, are the evident recurrent upliftings and subsidences of a large part of the surface, and the effects of denudation and drift.
The Cretaceous formation of New Jersey, which with the Tertiary covers the whole southern part of the State, was once the bottom of a shallow and quiet ocean; it is evident from its stratification that the surface of the land rose and fell with comparative regularity, so that the sea would advance at times and cover it, and then the bottom would be uplifted and the sea recede. Vegetation would start up upon the marshes and upland, which would after a time by subsidence of the land be overwhelmed in the waves, and then buried by degrees in the sea sediment.
In proof of all this, the immense quantities of fossil shells in this formation are found unbroken, and the bones of reptiles lying together undisturbed near where they lived and died; this would not be the case if the sea which covered them had been turbulent and stormy. That marine shells and sea sediments are found both above and below various beds or layers of vegetable fossils and the bones of land rep- tiles shows that alternately the land was submerged, and then for an age emerged from the waters. Yet all this time the land must have
98
SCHEYICHBI AND THE STRAND.
been subsiding on the whole; for a regular stratified formation some eight hundred feet thick was thus aggregated, and the topmost layer of shells was of course under the tide when it grew. This subsidence was followed by an elevation of the whole coast to about four hundred feet above the level of the sea, which was effected bodily ; but the up- lift seems to have been greatest in the northwest, so that the strata slope or "dip" toward the southeast at present. This upheaval was before the "drift period." When it came, the process of denudation reduced the land to nearly its present level and configuration.
The name of the Cretaceous formation is derived from England, and is significant of the great amount of chalk which characterizes it. The constituents of the formation in New Jersey are all earthy, except where in a few detached spots the material has become cemented by oxide of iron into a kind of sandstone or conglomerate. The strata are the upper marl bed, the yellow sand; the middle marl bed, the red sand; the lower marl bed, clay marls, and plastic clay. These last are of fresh-water origin, and are supposed to have originated from the decomposition of gneiss rock; they are the underlying strata when in place, but in actual situation crop out on the surface on the northern edge of the formation at Woodbridge, Perth Amboy, South Amboy, Washington, and Trenton; they are also used as potters' clay at sev- eral other places.
The other strata came to the surface one after another as distance increases towards the south, until at the commencement of the Tertiary formation the upper marl beds appear while the other strata are mostly subterranean.
Next to the evidences of denudation and drift presented by the sur- face of the Cretaceous district, the vast quantities of fossil shells and bones are remarkable. The shells of the clay beds are of fresh-water origin (such as the genus Unio, as fresh-water mussel and others), and may have grown at the bottom of lakes before the subsidence, or the fresh water may have been kept from the sea by hills and ridges. The green sand which abounds in the Cretaceous formation is sup- posed to have become granulated by forming inside very small shells, and is of chemical origin, and evidently a deposit from salt water, as the vast amount of fossil marine shells contained in it demonstrates.
One species of these shells, the Terebatula Harlani, forms a layer ninety miles long, over a mile wide, and about a yard in thickness in the middle marl bed. This layer is made up almost entirely of this species of shell, closely packed together. Immediately beneath the Terebatula Harlani shell layer is another equally large, made up of shells of the Pycnodonta convexa. Many other kinds of shells exist in great quantities in the Cretaceous formation at various places. Of these over three hundred varieties have been classified and described, with no certainty that the work is complete. In some marl beds a
99
FIRST USE OF THE MARL.
dozen or twenty varieties might be found in comparatively small space, and then again, as before described, beds of one kind of shells, a mile wide and several feet thick, are scores of miles in length.
The plastic clays of the Cretaceous formation of New Jersey are highly valuable to the potter and to the maker of fire-brick; the com- mon clays are useful too for ordinary brick-making; the gneiss of the Azoic formation, and the red sandstone or "brown stone" of the Triassic strata, and, very generally, the various colored limestones of the Paleozoic district of the State, are used in building ; the brown sand- stone of southern New Jersey serves the same purpose. The Triassic trap rock and sandstone is used in paving, and its slates for roofing. Iron and zinc mines are very rich in New Jersey, the iron produced being of the best; the zinc ore is generally rare elsewhere, yet ten years ago twenty-five thousand tons of it were dug yearly in Sussex County. This ore yielded seven thousand tons of "zinc white," and five hundred tons of metallic zinc; this was seven-tenths of all the zinc white manufactured in the United States, and about one-fourth of all the spelter produced. Yet it is probable the marl beds of the Creta- ceous formation, used alone as fertilizers, or in combination with its shell and stone lime, and the muck and peats of the region, are or might be made worth more than all the quarries and mines within the Commonwealth.
The green sand marl was first used as a fertilizer, in Monmouth County, in 1768, when "an Irishman" ditching for Peter Schenck " threw out a substance he called 'marl.'" It was spread over an acre and a half of land, where its good effects were visible for many years; " but," says the record, "this circumstance attracted no particular notice until 1811, when the farm came into the possession of John H. Smock;" then notice was taken of the effect of the marl, and the use of it began in the neighborhood. It had been used somewhat at that time in other places, but at no place in this country was the use of marl general before the present century began.
The discovery and use of the marl have raised thousands of acres of lands from sheer barrenness to remarkable fertility ; worn-out farms, where a family could not be supported, are now making their culti- vators rich by their productiveness. Bare sands are made to grow clover, and then crops of corn, potatoes, and wheat. "Pine barrens," by the use of marl, have been made into fruitful lands, and thus whole districts have been saved from depopulation, and the inhabitants of others increased.
Fifty-five years ago the six southern counties of New Jersey were described by Morse as four- fifths waste and barren land; this consti- tuted two-fifths of the entire State: now, large portions of this desert are under high and profitable culture, and the land in farms in the six southern counties is worth an average of over fifty dollars an acre.
100
SCHEYICHBI AND THE STRAND.
The Irishman who spread the first marl in New Jersey deserved more honor than many a conquering warrior; a monument erected to his memory would be more in keeping than to have him referred to in the State Geologist's Report merely as "an Irishman !"
In the marl-beds of the Cretaceous formation are abundant and extraordinary remains of extinct reptiles. They were of the orders THECODONTIA, SAUROPTERYGIA, TESTUDINATA, CROCODILIA, and DINO- SAURIA. A fine specimen of the last order is preserved in the Museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, and is classified as the Hadrosaurus Foulkii. It was a gigantic reptile, about twenty- eight feet long. The hind legs were very long, more than double the length of the fore limbs. The reptile walked on his hind legs as a man uses his legs, and ate foliage and vegetable food. It was a heavy unwieldy monster, living on land or in the marshes.
There were carnivorous reptiles also, some of them forty feet long, some only about twenty-five feet long, with a body as large round as an ox, and a long neck. These steered themselves by flippers like those of a whale, and propelled themselves by their tails. Some of them had flattened tails, and sculled themselves along as a boatman uses a single oar ; some of them had great conical teeth : they ate fish probably ; such were the Cimoliasaurus, the Elasmosaurus, the Mosa- saurus, and the Clidastes; the last, however, was more serpent-like, and fifteen feet long.
There have been more than twenty kinds of Tortoises, Turtles, or Terrapin found. One of them, the Euclastes, was full six feet long, and very strongly constructed. Others were as large, and some had ex- ceedingly thick shells, notably the Adocus Petrosus and Adocus Firmus. The Crocodiles, Alligators, and Gavials were very numerous ; three- fourths of the bones found are of this order, and the wonder is what such swarms of them lived on, as they have left no remains of their feasts to tell the story so far as yet seen. These horrid brutes were twenty feet long in some cases, but they varied in size, some being four feet long only.
The Dinosauria, of which order is the Hadrosaurus Foulkii, were the highest order of reptiles, and in some characteristics resembled birds. Many of them were as large as Mastodons and Elephants. Some of them squatted; some jumped like the Kangaroo; some, with great long legs, stalked around flopping their half-useless arms, and over- looking the levels with bird-like eyes set in a " bony visage," as if their face was trying to become a beak !
Such were the monsters of the Cretaceous land, such the shells once alive, when it was under the sea. These reptiles, and the vegetable remains in conjunction with them, indicate a torrid climate; but the bones of Walrus have been found in the neighborhood of Long Branch, and it is otherwise evident that their long summer was, in the " drift
.
IOI
DENUDATION AND DRIFT. .
period," turned, and perhaps suddenly, too, into an equally long and appalling winter.
§ The phenomenal effects of Denudation and Drift are not confined to any geologic formation or geographic locality, but may be observed throughout many extensive sections, and indicate the force of several agents acting at separate times upon diversified materials in different directions, and by various modes and in distinct degrees. These agents are evidently three,-wind, water, and ice,-and the mode of action by each is unlike. Exposure to the heat of the sun and the effects of cold and frost disintegrates the rocks and subjects them to the effect of drift- creating forces. The common variations of climate and season are efficient in this respect, but special causes in different ages have vastly intensified the influences of temperature and weather.
The influence of wind and of water is constant; but the vast effects of the ice-drift are referable to the geologic "Drift Period." The force of wind is active not alone in wearing away rocks, by whirling grit and transporting great quantities of sand, and building dunes and beaches along low shores, but in some places it wafts the sands of shores and deserts far over fertile fields and even forest hills, thus sadly increasing the area of sterility. In the African deserts the awful simoom blights vegetable growth and suffocates animals and men, then lets fall over the dead caravan thick layers and hills of sand for their winding-sheet and grave.
On the Western American plains, and among the mountains of that region, the winds have cut countless cavities into solid stone; these cuttings vary from small orifices and hollows to large channels and openings; in fact, in some localities the most of the strata has been worn away, and only small isolated elevations of fantastic form remain to denote the former level of the surrounding territory. On loose sand the operation of wind is obvious : the finer earth and dust is lifted and bodily conveyed to a distance in proportion to the strength of the blast. while the coarser sand and gravel is rolled, slid, and drifted along the surface, often up steep inclines and considerable elevations.
As a gale grows in violence, the power of wind increases in the same degree to an unknown limit: typhoons and cyclones exhibit its force in Indian seas, the West Indies are often devastated by hurricanes, and in portions of the United States whirlwinds and tornadoes sometimes level giant forests in their path, demolish strong buildings, and hurl the ruins far through the air. A hurricane in the West Indies broke down a very heavy wall, and rolled stones weighing hundreds of pounds along the ground !
By forcing a blast of air through a nozzle, and charging it with sand, made to impinge upon flint glass, artisans abrade, cut, grind, and en- grave the glass most rapidly. In a similar way, the wind, forcing itself through rocky canyons, notches, passes, defiles, fissures, and crevices
1
I02
SCHEYICHBI AND THE STRAND.
among the mountains, and sweeping over rainless plains, takes up the gritty débris and sharp sand and, whirling them along, drives them in an enormous rotating sand-blast against the rocks. Gneiss and adamant could not resist the impact and continued friction.
The effects of water and ice in the Drift Period have been closely studied and elaborately stated by the geologists, but it is possible the effects of winds have not been as fully observed and noted. By some commentators it is supposed that the destruction of the Assyrians (II. Kings, 35) was accomplished through the agency of a simoom, which certainly would be a sufficient natural cause for the death of even that host. However it may have been in this case, there is evi- dence throughout the scriptures of the Old and New Testament, but not confined to the Bible or any book, of the power of spiritual beings who, under Providence, use the forces of nature as their instruments to do the will of Heaven. No marvelous work is belittled or made less wonderful because we are enabled to discern the agencies and the method by and through which the Eternal Power is made manifest.
The evidence of the former submergence of vast areas which are now the elevated portions of continents, and of tremendous floods which have deluged the surface since it has been uplifted, appears almost everywhere, and seems to be amply convincing : tradition among savages, and the poems and mythological records of many races, refer to such phenomena, ascribing them generally to the action of the gods. The Bible account of the deluge, it is thought by some, finds corrobo- ration in these legends and poetical allegories of antiquity. Certain it is that water, in showers, floods, and oceans, has been the potent cause of distribution and change in geologic materials. When porous stones are exposed to rain and severe frost, they rapidly disorganize : the water penetrates the pores of the stone and is frozen there, the expan- sion of water changing to ice bursts the cells of the stone by the exertion of one of the most potent natural forces, and the rock soon crumbles from the effect of such weathering. Some rocks, when submerged or long subjected to the action of water, become "rotten stone," the cementing material in their composition being oxidized or dissolved away. In turbulent torrents the stones are dashed against each other and broken, they are ground together and pulverized, and, after tritura- tion, are borne away to form the sediment of quieter waters. Thus the winds, the rains, the streams, and the waves co-operate, and through their action, in time, the rocky mountains are reduced to a bed of sand, to be drifted about by every flood or borne away before the wind.
The influence of changing weather and seasons is incessant : every warm day, every wandering wind, every passing shower, is active in changing the surface of the earth, while geologic indications prove that not only have icy oceans rolled over what are now the mountain-tops of temperate climes, but glacier-like formations of ice, during the winter
103
THE EFFECT OF THE DRIFT.
ages, crept down from the pole, submerging the life of the zone beneath a curtain of frozen death. Gripping immense boulders of flinty rock in their icy flow, the frigid seas dragged them for hundreds of miles, firm fixed in the icebergs as a glazier's diamond in steel. Grinding heavily on the bottom of shallow seas, these enormous tools in the hands of Nature have scratched and scored the granite mountains, the trap. dikes, and the various ridges, until they have, in some cases, been utterly worn away under the long-continued and terrific abrasion and their débris scattered far and wide. From astronomical causes diver- gences are supposed to occur in the polarities of the earth, producing excessive and sudden but persistent changes in climate, or, as is known, comparatively slight deflections of constant winds and currents grad- ually bring about the same result. In the far north mastodons by thousands are to be found imbedded in ice, where and as they stood when the torrid climate congenial to them passed away at once, and paralyzing frost and overwhelming snow descending upon them estab- lished most abruptly the conditions of Arctic winter.
§ The Drift of New Jersey indicates not only a grand movement of the agencies of denudation from the northwest, but counter, or rather divergent, currents of a similar nature, due to local elevations or other secondary causes ; the main line of advance however being toward the southeast.
The Paleozoic formation to the northwest of the mountains was of course the first affected by the southward tending drift. The amount of material displaced is almost incredible. One body of drift in the Paleozoic district is one hundred miles or more long, from ten to fifty miles wide, and two to three thousand feet in depth.
The drift action in the Azoic formation has also been immense, and the evidence of it is to be seen not only among the gneiss-crowned mountains, but all over the State, as the disintegrated granite appears everywhere in almost every foot of gravel bed. On the lower margin or southern border of the Triassic formation a belt of gneiss rock is exposed ; this was drift from Azoic outcrops in the mountains, and has aggregated in its present place and concreted into stone, and then again has been in part abraded, disintegrated, and carried away. The most common soil of the Azoic formation is drift, deposited among the gneiss rocks and mountain ranges. There are limestone boulders in the neighborhood of the gneiss which weigh two thousand tons each, and which have drifted a mile at least, and perhaps several miles, and have been lifted one or two hundred feet. On Sparta mountain, twelve hundred feet above the sea, are found boulders which weigh a hundred tons, which have been carried there from an unknown distance. Boul- ders of ore have been carried into distant deposits far from the original strata, and have misled those who found them into the idea that they were indications of mines in the place where they were discovered.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.