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winter I endeavored to show that the water of Lake Ontario 
at Rochester, had been at least seventy feet lower than it now 
is, since it had been higher. This could have been accom- 
plished only. by such upheaval, or subsidence, or tilting of 
the land, as should make the shore at Rochester, in its relation 
to the outlet of the lake, seventy feet higher than at present. 
I have now to offer some facts from the West, that lead to 
allied conclusions. 
The beach lines that record former levels of Lake Erie, are 
well marked in the Maumee valley. The highest is at 220 
feet above the present, and others are at 195 and 170 feet, 
while from 90 to 65 feet a slow subsidence is recorded. 
These shore lines run far up the valley, and the higher 
stretch nearly to Fort Wayne, Indiana, one hundred miles 
from the present head of the lake. At New Haven, six miles 
Kast of that place, the beaches which mark the north and 
south shores of the old lake at its fullest stage, converge: but, 
instead of uniting, they become parallel, and are lost in the 
banks of an old water-course, one and one half miles broad, 
through which the surplus water of Lake Erie then discharged. 
_ This water-course I traced westward past Fort Wayne, twenty- 
five miles to Huntington, where it receives the Wabash river 
from the south east. Its sides and bottom are of drift nearly 
to Huntington, but there it has a bottom of Niagara limestone. 
No one traversing the ground can question that it is the chan- 
nel of a former outlet of Lake Erie. 
I conceive that this fact has an important bearing on thesolu- 
tion of the question :—what held the water of the Lake more 
than 200 feet higher than it is now? It precludes the answer 
that the continent was so submerged that the ocean opposed 
a watery barrier to the drainage of the lake basin, for there 
was an outward, descending flow at Fort Wayne. There are 
now no remnants of arocky barrier atall adequate. Professor 
Hall tells us that the rim of rock through which the Niagara 
river has cut, is but 88 feet higher than the lake at Buffalo ; 
and the rock—likewise Niagara limestone,—over which Lake 
Michigan once emptied southward to the Mississippi, is 
but halfas high. Professor Andrews, of Chicago, to whom J 
