=Fort Lee=, directly across the river, had a commanding position, but was entirely useless to the Revolutionary army after the fall of Fort Washington.  It was therefore immediately abandoned to the British, as was also Fort Constitution, another redoubt near at hand.

It will be remembered that the American army after long continued disaster in and about New York, retreated southward from Fort Lee and Hackensack to the Delaware, where Washington with a strategic stroke brought dismay on his enemies and restored confidence to his friends and the Patriots’ Cause.

=The Palisades, or Great Chip Rock=, as they were known by the old Dutch settlers, present the same bold front to the river that the Giant’s Causeway does to the ocean.  Their height at Fort Lee, where the bold cliffs first assert themselves, is three hundred feet, and they extend about seventeen or eighteen miles to the hills of Rockland County.  A stroll along the summit reveals the fact that they are almost as broken and fantastic in form as the great rocks along the Elbe in Saxon-Switzerland.

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  The Palisades in sterner pride
  Tower as the gloom steals o’er the tide,
  For the great stream a bulwark meet
  That laves its rock-encumbered feet.

  Robert C. Sands.

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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.