102 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
small boulders. The bottom and banks of the little creek are of prairie earth, 
witha few small boulders. It is probably underlaid by drift. About 10 rods east 
of the well, in the north bank of the gap, there is a small vertical washout at the 
base of the bluff, up to a height of 40 feet. The depth of the washout into the 
bank is about eight feet. Its sides hold grass and shrubs. At the bottom, which 
is fresh, the native strata in the hill are exposed. The deposit at its foot forms a 
truncated semicone about five feet high and 60 to 80 feet across. It is mostly 
glacial material, The entire end of the hill, as well as the sides of the ridge, is 
covered with glacial drift. 
About 50 feet above the base of the bluff, and about 40 feet below its summit, 
the edge of a stratum of limestone crops out at the south end of the ridge. 
Very little of it is to be seen through the enveloping drift. Some pieces of the 
limestone are lifted slightly from their position, upturned, and pushed around to- 
ward the west. They are held in that position by the packing of drift material 
about them. 
In passing down the sides of the hill in any direction it is difficult to de- 
termine, without digging, where the solid covering of drift ends and the super- 
ficial covering, or talus, begins; as drift covers the entire upper surface of the 
hill down to 50 feet or more. But, using our best judgment, Professor Cragin 
and I estimated a thickness of 30 to 35 feet of drift on top of the ridge. If it 
be supposed to be all drift above the limestone, it would be about 40 feet. 
Elevations were made with an eye-level and an aneroid barometer. 
This moraine contains boulders of local rock in addition to the quartzites and 
metamorphic sandstones. Especially noticeable were some blocks of purple- 
brown ferruginous sandstone filled with large irregular nodules of snuff-colored 
or brownish-yellow ochery clay. This is before spoken of as argillaceous iron- 
stone. I have seen this in the Dakota sandstone in central Kansas, but do not 
know where it outcrops north of here; probably not within the state. 
Broken stones were frequently noticed in the moraine. Some of the sand- 
stones and conglomerates were separated along planes of stratification, through 
the ordinary process of weathering; but some sandstones and quartzites were 
split across through the solidest part, as though done through concussion or 
shock. One quartzite boulder, 10 feet in diameter, half a mile east of Burnett’s 
mound, is broken into three pieces. The pieces lie close together with the frac- 
tured faces facing each other. The interior faces are rough and covered with 
lichens. Other large fractured boulders are known elsewhere. 
How Bovuxpers BREAK. 
How to account for the breaking of these stonesis a problem. I hesitatingly 
offer this solution : 
A stone fell from the ice’and struck another. If the perpendicular height of 
the ice front were, as before stated,* equal to or greater than the height of 
Burnett’s mound, it would be, say 100 to 200 feet. That fall would of itself be in- 
sufficient to break a stone, when 75 feet of that distance was through water and 
floating ice. Observations made on glaciers by other observers have shown that, 
though dirt and small pebbles sink into the ice during sunshine, the rays of the 
sun do not penetrate large stones, but they act as a protection to the ice under- 
neath. Stones carried in the middle of a large ice-field will, in the course of time, 
reach the surface by the melting of the superjacent ice as the ice is pushed to 
* See Trans. Kan. Acad. Sci., XIV, p. 222. 
