184 Ou1o STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
near the other Great Lakes SOUS that the whole region has 
undergone tilting. 
GILBERT’S RESEARCHES. 
Whether this tilting is still going on or ceased long ago does 
not appear from an examination of these old beaches. In 1895. 
Mr. G. K. Gilbert found evidence that it was still continuing. 
By comparing the heights above the normal lake level of a 
bench-mark in Cleveland and one at the head of the Welland 
Canal with the heights of the same as carefully determined in 
1858, it appeared that the land near the northeast end of the lake 
had risen as compared with Cleveland. In like manner he found 
that tilting was still going on 1n the region of Lake Ontario and 
Lake Huron and Michigan. 
DEEPENING OF THE WATER. 
Inasmuch as the tilting produces a rise of the land toward 
the northeast as compared with that toward the southwest it is 
elevating the point of outlet of Lake Erie as compared with the 
rest of the lake. As the lake is continually receiving water 
through the Detroit River and other sources the elevation of the 
point of outflow raises the level of the water throughout the 
entire basin. 
In 1860, H. A. Winters now living in Sandusky, had occasion 
to visit Eagle Island many times. In a pond too deep for hip 
boots, but which he crossed with his boat, was a walnut stump 
whose sapwood had rotted away. The heartwood about four 
feet in diameter was still well preserved and showed that it had 
been neatly chopped off. Alvin Fox told him that he had 
helped to chop the tree in 1828, when the land about it was all 
dry. Through the summer of 1860 the stump stood in about 
two feet of water. 
According to J. W. Lockwood, who lives on the north side 
of Sandusky Bay near the Plaster Beds, a man named Craighill 
cut an oak supposed to be two hundred or three hundred years 
old about 1823 or 1824 on what was then a dry prairie but where 
there has been a marsh ever since. This marsh borders what is 
known as West Harbor in the peninsula north of Sandusky Bay. 
These observations and many others made it clear that the 
water had deepened but in view of the fluctuations produced by 
rainfall and the lack of early records of rainfall they did not 
afford a means of calculating with any degree of accuracy how 
fast the deepening would progress if the rainfall remained 
uniform. Not until the fall of 1904 was any means discovered 
of making such a calculation. It came from studying the parallel 
ridges which traverse the terminal portion of the Cedar Point 
