OUTER MORAINE OF THE MIAMI LOBE. 321 



its main line and a starch factory east of the railway. The cutting passes 

 through a till knoll about 30 feet high. Yellow till covers tlie knoll like 

 a blanket to a depth of about 12 feet. The till is soft and has no silty 

 covering. Below it is a dark-blue till, also soft, having pebbles very irreg- 

 ularly distributed, being thicklj^ set in places, but in other places nearly 

 free from them. Where pebbles are wanting the material has the appear- 

 ance of a ver}- fine, laminated, sandy clay. In the deeper part of the 

 cutting some coarser sand of yellowish color is exposed. Large pieces of 

 wood were embedded in the blue till at a depth of 30 feet beneath the 

 hig-hest part of the knoll. The largest piece observed was about a foot in 

 diameter and 3 to 4 feet long. It was very soft and so spongy that a spade 

 could be pushed into it readily. One large piece, several inches in diameter, 

 had a curled grain and an irregular surface and appeared to be a root. 



John Bousall Porter, formerly eng-ineer of the Glendale waterworks, 

 informed the writer that several of the suburbs of Cincinnati have obtaiiied 

 a public water supply by sinking tubular wells in Mill Creek Valley. 

 These wells ordinarily penetrate 75 to 150 feet of blue clay, largely 

 glacial, beneath which is sand and fine gravel, which has been penetrated 

 in some cases 100 feet without entering rock. From this sand, which 

 Porter regards as the deposit of an old river, an unlimited supply of good 

 water is obtained. The wells at the Glendale plant, in the center of Mill 

 Creek Valley, 2 miles from the village, pass through 97 feet of "drift and 

 alluvium," then strike coarse sand of dark color, which in one case wah 

 penetrated 78 feet without reaching rock. The altitude at the bottom of 

 the deepest well is only 395 feet above tide, or about 40 feet below the low- 

 water level of the Ohio at Cincinnati. The water stands in the wells at 

 about 560 feet above tide, or practically at the surface. Other villages 

 using wells of this class at the time this communication was received (June, 

 1895) are Wyoming, Hartwell, Reading, Carthage, St. Bernard, Norwood, 

 Linwood, and Madisonville. The last five lie outside the limits of this 

 moraine. The wells at Norwood reach a depth of 235 feet, but those at 

 other villages fall below 200 feet. Whether the sand found in the lower 

 part of these wells is strictly alluvial and earlier than the glacial deposits, 

 or whether its deposition resulted in some way from the ice invasion, can 

 not perhaps be decided at present. 



It may perhaps be diflicult to determine how much of the drift in Mill 



MON XLI 21 



