gloom steals o'er the tide,
For the great stream a bulwark meet
That laves its rock-encumbered feet.

_Robert C. Sands._

* * *

As the basaltic trap-rock is one of the oldest geological formations,
we might still appropriately style the Palisades "a chip of the old
block." They separate the valley of the Hudson from the valley of the
Hackensack. The Hackensack rises in Rockland Lake opposite Sing Sing,
within two or three hundred yards of the Hudson, and the rivers flow
thirty miles side by side. Some geologists think that originally they
were one river, but they are now separated from each other by a wall
more substantial than even the 2,000 mile structure of the "Heathen
Chinee."

It might also be interesting to note Prof. Newberry's idea that in
pre-glacial times this part of the continent was several hundred feet
higher than at present, and that the Hudson was a very rapid stream
and much larger than now, draining as it did the Great Lakes: that the
St. Lawrence found its way through the Hudson Channel following pretty
nearly the line of the present Mohawk, and the great river emptied
into the Atlantic some 80 miles south of Staten Island. This idea is
confirmed by the soundings of the coast survey which discover the
ancient page of the Hudson as here indicated on the floor of the sea
far out where the ocean is 500 feet in depth. A speculation of what a
voyager a few million years ago would have then seen might, however,
as Hamlet observes, be "to consider somewhat too curiously" for
ordinary up-to-date tourists. But even, granting all this to be true,
the Palisades were already old, thrown up long ages before, between
a rift in the earth's surface, where it cooled in columnar form.
The rocky mould which held it, being of softer material, finally
disintegrated and crumbled away, leaving the cliff with its peculiar
perpendicular formation.

A recent writer has said: "The Palisades are among the wonders of the
world. Only three other places equal them in importance, but each of
the four is different from the others, and the Palisades are unique.
The Giant's Causeway on the north coast of Ireland, and the cliffs at
Kawaddy in India, are thought by many to have been the result of the
same upheaval of nature as the Palisades; but the Hudson rocks seem
to have preserved their entirety--to have come up in a body, as it
were--while the Giant's Causeway owes its celebrity to the ruined
state in which th