SURFACE GRAVELS AND SANDS. 



85 



which is occupying the position as in front of a beach. The ridges may be 

 replaced by cones, resembling delta deposits. The ridges are often scarcely 

 less direct and scarcely more broken or more varying in height than beaches, 

 especially when the subsequent erosion and unequal elevation, caused by 

 terrestrial movements since the gravels were deposited, is taken into account. 

 The ridges are often found to divide and enclose kettle-like depressions, 

 sometimes dry and sometimes containing ponds or lakelets, just like similar 

 depressions along modern beaches, but on a larger scale. Branches and 

 spurs add to the undulating appearance of the country. In front of these 

 hills the plains may be covered with gravel. It is very difficult not to see 

 in these ridges the remains of beaches belonging to former shore-lines. A 

 single ridge of this character occurs behind a plain just north of Stouffville, 

 Ontario, rising to a height of seventy-five feet above the plain, which is 

 about 1,100 feet above the sea. This deposit rests against another and some- 

 what larger ridge of sand and gravel belonging to group I b. Again, 

 within a distance of about fourteen miles, stretching northwestward from a 

 point near Flesherton (shown in fig. 7), there are three steps, each in the 

 form of a slightly undulating plain, often paved with gravel, bounded by 

 just such hills of gravel as are here described. These marginal ridges 

 are much indented with kettle depressions (k, k, fig. 7), and are somewhat 



Figure 7— Section extending Northward from near Flesherton. 



b = Boulder pavement. g, g = Ridge.s of Artemisia gravel, k, k = Depressi' as behind the 

 gravel ridges. 



beneath the level of well-marked terraces, as if a somewhat off-shore 

 deposit. The elevation of the country above the sea descends from 1,600 

 to 1,200 feet. The ridges (g, g, fig. 7) border a mass of land that was rising 

 out of, probably, the sea. The beach-like character of these accumulations 

 is further brought out by the occurrence of zones of boulder pavements at 

 levels below and immediately in front of the ridges (b, fig. 7). These 

 boulder pavements, which do not enter the mass of the drift but only rest 

 upon its surface, are too characteristic of the action of waves cutting into 

 stony drift and of the accompanying action of coast-ice not to be regarded 

 here as additional evidence of the coastal formation of the surface gravel 

 ridges, described in this paragraph. 



