BLANCHARD OR DEFIANCE MORAINE. 605 



valleys their amount is very slight, the greater part of the sections exposed 

 in their bluffs being ordinary till with little or no surface capping of silt, 

 and with only occasional exposures of silt beneath the till. The slight 

 exposures which occur may indicate that there were extensive deposits 

 of silt in these valleys previous to the last ice invasion, the greater part of 

 which was removed by the advancing ice sheet. In the Cuyahoga Valley 

 the amount was too great for the ice sheet to remove 



The silts exposed along the Cuyahoga are not so fine (at least in the 

 southern portion of the valley) as those in certain other valleys, being 

 sufficiently coarse for the detection of individual grains by the naked eye; 

 they are called quicksand when penetrated in wells. So far as examined 

 by the writer they are entu-ely free from pebbles, but Claypole reports the 

 occurrence of an occasional pebble and very rarely a large stone. They 

 are horizontally bedded, or nearly so, the thin layers or laminae being dis- 

 tinctly traceable, since they are in places separated by thin partings of 

 sand. The color is generally blue, though in the upper portion it is yellow 

 to a depth ranging from 10 up to 50 feet or more. The silt is notably 

 siliceous, but contains also considerable lime and iron. The amount of lime 

 increases perceptibly in passing from south to north along the valley, there 

 being in the southern portion scarcely any nodules of lime and but a faint 

 response upon application of hydrochloric acid, while in silts from the 

 northern portion, from the vicinity of Peninsula northward, lime nodules 

 abound. The silt is also more compact in the northern than in the southern 

 portions of the valley. In exposures east of Everett, crystals of sulphate 

 of lime occur in the blue silt. The silt here rises in a solid bank to a 

 height of 225 feet (barometric) above the river or about 360 feet above 

 Lake Erie, and is capped by 15 to 20 feet of till in which large bowlders 

 are embedded. The yellow silt here has a thickness of about 50 feet, the 

 greatest thickness observed in any exposure along the valley. The highest 

 observed altitude of the silt is in the lowland tract west of Akron (which 

 leads from the Cuyahoga through Copley Marsh to the Tuscarawas River), 

 where it reaches an altitude 375 to 400 feet above Lake Erie. It stands 

 higher here than in the valley that leads through Akron along the line of 

 the Ohio Canal. In each valley there are heavy deposits of gravel or other 

 coarse material above the silt. In the western valley there is till as well as 

 sand and gravel; in the eastern, sand and gravel alone are reported. The 



