Newberry.] *^'-' [Nov. 4, 



times hundreds of feet above tlieir former beds ; and (4), that glaciers had 

 once occupied the basins of our great lakes, moving in the lines of their 

 major axes.* 



These facts formed the basis of the history of the formation of our lake 

 basins which I then reported. 



This history may be briefly epitomized as follows : — 



1st. In the Tertiary age a great river traversed and drained'the basin 

 of the lakes, rising in the highlands north of Lake Superior, and terminat- 

 ing in the Atlantic ocean eighty miles south and east of New York. 



2d. In the advent and decline of the Ice period, local glaciers descend- 

 ing from the Canadian highlands and following the lines of lowest level, 

 scooped out expansions of the river valleys forming the basins of the 

 present lakes. 



3d. These basins were connected by canons which cut the rock barriers 

 separating them, and through which flowed their surplus waters. 



4th. At the culmination of the Ice perioct a general ice sheet filled and 

 overflowed the lake basin, choking up the river valleys frith boulder clay, 

 and obliterating the details of local topography. 



5th. After the retreat of the glaciers the great river which drained the 

 lake basin, finding its old channel obstructed, chose for itself a new route. 

 Following the line of lowest levels it left its former trough buried under 

 the Grand Sable, to cross a spur of the Canadian highlands at Sault St. 

 Marie, again it crossed a point extending northward from the Alleghany 

 highlands at Niagara, and, finally, its Mohawk channel being obstructed 

 it chose a new route by the Thousand Islands and Lachine Rapids to the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence. 



A large number of facts sustaining these conclusions are given in the 

 papers to which reference has been made, but a repetition of that which 

 has been so fully stated would be superfluous here. 



In tracing the course of the ancient river which drained the lake basin, 

 I ventured to predict that a buried channel would be found connecting the 

 basins of Lake Erie and Lake- Ontario, "somewhere between Long Point 

 and the western end of Lake Ontario." 



This channel Prof. J. W. Spencer, of King's College, Windsor, N. S., 

 claims to have discovered ; and in a paper published in the last issue of the 

 Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, he maps and describes 

 it, locating it where I had predicted its discovery, although he says it is a 



♦The first suggestion of the existence of these ancient buried channels was 

 given by tlie borings for oil in the valley of the Cuyahoga at Cleveland, where I 

 then resided, and in the valleys of other tributaries to the Lake system or the 

 Ohio. Every stream bed in that section was at that time probed for petroleum, 

 and in most cases the rock bottoms of the valleys were only reached after pene- 

 trating a considerable mass of clay beneath the present stream. At Cleveland 

 the rock bottom of the old valley is two hundred feet below the bottom of the 

 river, and the lake basin into which it flows, though silted up to within sixty 

 feet of the surface of the water, was once excavated to a still greater depth than 

 the river trough. 



