522 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



Id describing the northeasterly and .southwesterly and northwesterly 

 and southeasterly directions of the rock striae, he announced that he 

 had no hesitation in asserting that the force which produced the south- 

 westerly striae was "from the ocean toward the interior, against the 

 slope of the St. Lawrence valley," and as he could not conceive of a 

 glacier moving from the Atlantic up into the interior he considered 

 this as at once disposing of the glacial theory. He conceived, rather, 

 that a subsidence took place sufficient to convert all the plains of 

 Canada, New York, and New England into sea. This, he felt, would 

 determine the direction of the Arctic current which would move up 

 this slope. He would account for the excavation of the basins of the 

 Great Lakes in a similar way. Supposing the land submerged so that 

 the Arctic current from the northeast should pour over the Laurentian 

 rocks on the northern side of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, it would 

 cut out the softer strata, forming the basins and drifting the material 

 to the southwest. 



The lower strata of this current would be directed through and 

 between the Laurentide hills and the Adirondacks, and, flowing over 

 the ridge of hard rock which connects them at the Thousand Isles, 

 would cut out the basin of Lake Ontario and heap up at the same time 

 the mass of bowlder clay intervening between Lake Ontario and 

 Georgian Bay. Lake Erie, he thought, might have been cut by the 

 flow of the upper layers of water over the middle Silurian escarpment, 

 Lake Michigan being likewise due to this unequal erosion. The 

 northwesterly and southeasterly stria? he conceived were produced by 

 a return of the northeast-southwest current, obstructions causing it 

 to flow along the valleys of Lake Champlain, the Connecticut, and 

 the low countiy between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. He would 

 not wholly exclude the action of glaciers, but thought such were 

 limited to the mountain tops. Old sea beaches, he thought, had been 

 mistaken for moraines, and he found evidences of ocean breakers 

 almost to the summits of the White Mountains. Lake basins and 

 fiords in the northern latitudes are all due to current and wave action, 

 the cold Arctic currents being appealed to rather than the warm 

 surface currents. He also felt sure that the numerous indentations of 

 the coast of the United States were due to the action of waves rather 

 than of ice. 



In the autumn and winter of 1863-64 Raphael Pumpelly, of Rhode 

 Island, was engaged by the Chinese Government to examine the coal 

 fields west of Peking. Incidentally he made journeys in northern 



China and Mongolia. Subsequently, in 1864-65, he 

 china e 'i 863^64 rk ' n c "°* 8e d into Siberia and journeyed overland to St. 



Petersburg. The results of his observations on the 

 geology of the region were published in the Smithsonian Contributions 

 to Knowledge, 1866, forming a quarto pamphlet of 144 pages with 8 



