PHYSICAL AND CLIMATIC fiETTING 5 



from her neighbors and interferes with communica- 

 tion east and west in tlie Lower Peninsula and north 

 and south in the Upper Peninsula, and divides the 

 peoples of either section of the State from their 

 fellow citizens of the other. It throws the southern 

 peninsula into closest business and social contact 

 with Ohio and Indiana, while the similar trend of 

 the State "above the Straits" is in the direction 

 of Wisconsin. It has created two states in the guise 

 of one. It has produced enclaves like "Copperdom," 

 with the economic and social body of the common- 

 wealth. 



The two major land masses which, with their 

 appendages, thrust themselves in among the western 

 members of the Great Lakes group, present note- 

 worthy variations in geological structure and climate 

 and, consequently, in biological, economic and social 

 conditions. Their topography is characteristically 

 glacial, a land surface of glacial drift with occasional 

 moraines, eskers and drumlins, and of lakes, swamps 

 and marshes, some long since extinct and others still 

 extant, while, especially in the north, plainly striated 

 areas of bed rock testify to the movement of glacial 

 ice again and again over the surface of the land. 

 Areas of sand, gravel and clay, quite pure or much 

 intermingled, are interspersed casually among the 

 watered depressions and rocky excrescences of the 

 State. And yet if one have regard to the chief 

 physical tendencies, Michigan comprises three quite 

 distinct sections : the Upper Peninsula and the north- 

 ern and southern halves of the Lower Peninsula. 



