238 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



bonaceous shales of eastern uplands there become more like coal, and at the 

 southern part of the divide between Big and Little Stranger there is one seam 

 of good coal. 



THE DRIFT, 



Under date of August 27, 1868, Wilder's Annals of Kansas has this passage: 

 "Prof. Louis Agassiz, Roscoe Conkling, Ward Hunt, and other eastern men, 

 visit Leavenworth. Agassiz said he had never seen such good soil as he had 

 seen in Kansas and Missouri." This is part of a much longer passage, which 

 is an abbreviation of an article a column and a half long in the Leavenworth 

 "Conservative" of the same date. Professor Agassiz was the apostle of the 

 drift. It was he who by study of the glaciers in his native Switzerland rose 

 to the scientific explanation of the drift deposits of northern Europe and 

 northeastern America. He converted to his theory every distinguished geolo- 

 gist of his day, including Sir Charles Lyell. In addition to recording the 

 fact of the visit of Agassiz to Leavenworth, D. W. Wilder has told the writer 

 an interesting incident of that visit which I think I am violating no confi- 

 dence to repeat. Agassiz said to Wilder, "Have you any boulders here?" 

 "Our Web", though not a geologist, said he thought there were, remembering 

 a stone somewhere about the city that he guessed was what the scientist 

 wanted, and they went out from the assembly of railway magnates to look 

 at a rock. Agassiz was overjoyed. He was delighted, and said he had found 

 here, 5,000 miles from his home, the confirmation of the theory he had 

 worked out in Switzerland. If we could only find that particular stone we 

 would set it up in front of the Leavenworth high school and imbed in it a 

 tablet of enduring brass to record its interview with the arch-interpreter of 

 boulders. 



That boulder was one of many that may be seen within the civic boun- 

 daries of Leavenworth — one of multitudes that are scattered over the county, 

 that in some places are like great streams of stones on the prairie, that on 

 some high tops are so close logether as to suggest artificial pavement. These 

 red, gray and green boulders with associated gravels and some forms of clay 

 and some markings of the bed rock constitute the phenomena which we in- 

 clude in the term drift. These boulders have come from far. Though much 

 older here than Regis, Loisel, or Coronado, they are not native Kansans. 

 They were, brought here by a force tremendously in excess of their own inert- 

 ness. They were brought by the ice that overspread all the continent to the 

 northeast, which ground its way over the granites and greenstones and hard 

 limestones of British America and Minnesota, tearing huge masses from their 

 beds and doing the same with the hard red quartzites of Minnesota and 

 Dakota, and bearing the accumulation, with scarcely more than the sharpest 

 edges worn off, to be dropped out in Kansas and Iowa when the ice melted 

 under the returning geniality of climate. 



The boulders are of all sizes, from that of a nut to a mass of several tons. 

 In Leavenworth county there are comparatively few along the Missouri river 

 front. They are found in great numbers along the sides and top of Pilot 

 Knob ridge and the valleys of Seven and Nine Mile creeks, and still more 

 numerous on the other side of the ridge toward Little Stranger and Salt 

 creek. On the watershed between the two Strangers they are in great force. 

 The ice containg the boulders probably ground down the surface of that slope 

 to the south, and in time of melting rested there while its stony burden was 

 strung along the surface. Gravels as separate deposits with few boulders are 

 scarce, but they may be seen near Lansing and northwest of Tonganoxie and 



