544 GLACIAL FORMATIONS OF ERIE AND OHIO BASINS. 



The moi-ainic knolls seldom exceed 15 feet and the majority fall below 

 10 feet in height, but this amount of undulation puts the moraine in striking 

 contrast with the very level tracts bordering it, on which an undulation of 

 5 feet can scarcely be found. The moraine differs from the bordering 

 tracts also in being much more liberally supplied with surface bowlders. 

 Winchell, in his report on Marion County, calls attention to these bowl- 

 ders, some of which are stated to be 6 feet in diameter.-' The bowldery 

 tract referred to by Winchell is immediately west of the Scioto River, 

 where the bowlders are perhaps more numerous than in any other part of 

 the moraine. 



The moraine, like the bordering plains, seems to be composed mainly 

 of till. Two wells in Mount Victory reach the rock at about 60 feet. One 

 is at a livery stable, the other is the town well in the street southeast of the 

 station of the Big Four Railway. In each the drift is mainly till. The 

 southern part of the city of Marion touches the inner border of the moraine. 

 Here wells in the vicinity of Delaware avenue, at a level about 20 feet 

 above the railway stations at Marion, penetrate 50 feet of drift, mainly till. 

 In the business portion of the city of Marion and from there northward to 

 the quarries, a mile north of the city, there is scarcely any drift, so that 

 rock is struck in many places in grading the streets. 



That there was not a vigorous drainage down the Scioto at the time 

 this moraine was forming is inferred from the character of the valley drift. 

 No well-defined terrace heads in the moraine, and the valley is filled with 

 till from the moraine southward to Prospect, as it is from the moraine 

 northward. On a previous page Winchell's account of a gravelly belt along 

 the Scioto from Prospect southward is presented. This gravelly belt, how- 

 ever, was apparently a subglacial forma,tion about contemporaneous with 

 the Broadway moraine. It certainly has not the level surface of a terrace. 



Between this moraine and its neighbor on the north there is a jjlain, 

 much of which is treeless. It has a black prairie soil a foot or more in 

 depth and occasional low knolls rise abruptly above the level of the plain. 

 These have a clayey soil less black than the plains. The drift on this plain 

 ranges from a thin coating up to 50 feet or more in thickness and is mainly 

 till. Occasional bowlders dot the surface, but they are not so numerous as 

 on the moraine south of the plain. 



1 Geology of Ohio, Vol. I, 1873, p. 644. 



