102 GLACIAL FORMATIONS OF ERIE AND OHIO BASINS. 



Portsmouth. As the latter is the present course of drainage, we naturally 

 turn to it first. 



An examination of the Scioto Valley below Waverly has brought to 

 light an old oxbow channel immediately back of the town of Lucasville, 

 which has about the same altitude as the channel of the old Kanawha east 

 of that point, but which appears to have been formed by a much smaller 

 stream than that which formed the channel of the Kanawha. Its breadth, 

 as shown in fig. 3, is only about a half mile, while that of the old Kanawha 

 Valley is more than a mile at its narrowest places and 1^ miles or more at 

 its broadest places. This small channel has every appearance of being the 

 main if not the only line of discharge for the stream that opened it. It is 

 such a channel as would be expected from a stream which di-ained only the 

 small area that lies between Lucasville and the supposed divide near 

 Manchester, Ohio. It cei'tainly testifies strongly against the discharge of 

 the old Kanawha southward from Waverly. 



A similar oxbow of a small stream was found on the south side of the 

 Ohio near Quincy, Ky., about 10 miles below the mouth of the Scioto. It, 

 however, stands so much higher than the oxbow at Lucasville (being neai'ly 

 150 feet above its level) that it seems likely to have been abandoned at 

 an earlier date than the Lucasville oxbow; but it may, nevertheless, have 

 been produced by the same small stream, it being not unnatural for oxbows 

 to be abandoned during a process of downcutting in a valley. The correla- 

 tion in agency rather than the correlation in date is the important matter, 

 and on this the two oxbow channels are in harmony, for they each appear 

 to show the agency of a much smaller stream than the old Kanawha. 



Turning now to the portion of the Scioto north from Waverly, it is 

 found to carry a broad gradation plain similar to that of the abandoned 

 part of the old Kanawha, which can easily be traced to the vicinity of 

 Chillicothe, where it passes below the level of the Scioto and soon becomes 

 deeply buried beneath deposits of glacial drift. 



The writer called attention to this northward line of discharge for the 

 middle portion of the Ohio in his report to the Director in June, 1896, and 

 suggested that it was probably tributary to the drainage basin of the Saint 

 Lawrence.-* In a paper prepared a few months later^ this interpretation was 



1 Seventeenth Ann. Eept. U. S. Geol. Survey, Ft. I, 1896, p. 61. 



^Changes of drainage in southern Ohio: Bull. Denison Univ., Vol. IX, Pt. II, 1897, pp. 18-21. 



