104 GLACIAL FORMATIONS OF ERIE AND OHIO BASINS. 



channeling would be so much greater than is required for a northward course 

 along the axis of the basin that one can scarcel}' resist ruhng out the north- 

 westward course. Yet from what is found on the Lower Ohio, where the 

 stream passes directly across the low Devonian shale area into the knobstone 

 and sandstone formations that now stand much higher, sucli a ruling may 

 be unwarranted. The presence of the low basin occupied by Lake Erie 

 offers an additional argument in favor of the northward route. This basin 

 would be reached by that route in less than half the distance required to 

 reach a similar low tract in the Wabash region or the Lake Michigan Basin 

 by the northwestward route. Each of these routes falls within regions so 

 heavily covered with glacial deposits that the course of the channels can be 

 traced only by means of borings, and these are so few and so poorly distrib- 

 uted as to be inadequate to our needs. 



DEFLECTIONS OF DRAINAGE. 



In changing from its old course to its present one the Kanawha system 

 has suffered several notable deflections. The principal one is that which 

 turned the waters southward from the Scioto Basin to the present Ohio at 

 Portsmouth, and thence westward into the Lower Ohio; a second deflection 

 carried the waters of the Kanawha westward from Wheelersburg (where 

 the old Kanawha turned north from the Ohio) to Portsmouth, thus abandon- 

 ing the part of the old channel between Wheelersburg and Waverly; a 

 third turned the Ka,nawha north from the east end of Teays (or Teazes) 

 Valley (near St. Albans, W. Va.) to the Ohio at Point Pleasant, thus 

 abandoning Teays Valley from St. Albans to Huiitington. It is not certain 

 that these changes were made at one time, though they appear to have 

 been made in close succession. The second and third appear to have been 

 nearly contemporaneous from the fact that the abandoned channels are each 

 at the level of the main gradation plain, about 150 feet above the present 

 level of the Ohio River. It seems probable that the deflection to the Lower 

 Ohio may have preceded the deflection from Wheelersburg to Portsmouth, 

 there being apparently no sufficient reason for the latter to have taken place 

 until the western line of discharge from Portsmouth had been opened. 



The change which resulted in the deflectioii of the old Kanawha into 

 the Lower Ohio seems to have required considerable erosion in the vicinity 

 of the old divide, even tliiDugh it occurred when the streams of the old 

 Kanawha system were flowing in A-alleys whose depth ^\as nuich less than 



