adjacent hills. If an enormous sheet of plywood were placed across the Eastern Uplands, it would be seen that the plane of hilltops slopes to the south at about 10 to 20 feet per mile. Near the Massachusetts border many hills crest above 1000 feet, and most are at least 800 feet high; further south, hilltop elevations reach 500 to 700 feet. The plane continues sloping gently southward until a little below Norwich. There, the slope of the plane abruptly increases to about 50 feet per mile, until the hills plunge into Long Island Sound. This zone of steeper slope parallels Connecticut's Coast, reaching 10 to 15 miles inland, and is called the Coastal Slope. The origin of these sloping planes of hilltops, called peneplains, is still disputed.

Many valleys and gorges cut into the peneplains, defining where one hill ends and the next one begins. The valleys owe their origin primarily to erosion by streams. Over millions of years, streams have incised deeply into the softer metamorphic rock types, leaving the harder metamorphic rocks standing up high as hills. (Although Connecticut's metamorphic rocks on the whole are much harder than the Central Valley's brownstone, some metamorphic rocks are harder than others.) In more recent geologic time the efforts of streams have been augmented by glacial erosion.

Curiously, many of the large features of the Eastern Uplands had not been named at the time of this writing, and, consequently, the reader may not be familiar with some of the geographic names used in this book. In attempting to classify the state's land, I have found it necessary to coin a few names and dredge others up out of old, seldom read publications. The lack of commonly used names illustrates something of the character of the Eastern Uplands. When one looks at scenery in a wide vista, the mind is presented with so much information and so much detail that it is often hard to pick out the significant features. If, however, a large feature is in view, it stands out because of its very size and reduces the confusion of the scene. Thus, most residents of the Central Valley have no doubt taken notice of at least one of the traprock ridges. But in the Eastern Uplands, few features really stand out and take command of the scenery the way a traprock ridge does. There are several reasons for this. The hills and ridges are so similar in size and

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