434 FRANK BURSLEY TAYLOR 
moraines that do show a marked tendency to take a particular 
form, and it is upon these that we must rely. 
Here again it is necessary to recur to the law of the higher 
value of the simplest phenomena as a basis of interpretation 
when compared with those that are more complex. If in the 
present state of our knowledge we go to the compounded 
moraines of interlobate areas, or to the more-or less obscure 
moraines of the mountains or hilly eastern states, it will be 
found very difficult to reach any satisfactory conclusion. But 
some of the moraines of northern Indiana, northwestern Ohio, 
and southeastern Michigan present the utmost simplicity of form, 
and were built under the operation of forces acting in the freest 
and simplest way possible. Upon these moraines, and especially 
upon those of them that seem to be most typical in their sim- 
plicity, I rely mainly for the conclusions reached. 
The moraines of northeastern Indiana have been studied in 
detail by Professor C. R. Dryer, from whose report I quote as 
follows: 
The peculiar topography of the Wabash-Erie region in Indiana would be 
strikingly shown by a section along any line radiating southwesterly or 
northwesterly from ‘Paulding, Ohio. Such a line would run nearly level 
across the Maumee Lake bottom to the Van Wert and Hicksville Ridge, then 
rise 80 to 1oo feet in four or five miles to the crest of the St. Marys and St. 
Joseph moraine, then fall fifty feet in about one mile, then cross a level inter- 
val of from one to ten miles, then show a second gradual rise and more 
abrupt fall, across the Wabash-Aboite moraine, and the second terrace aver- 
aging about sixty feet higher than the first. In the southern portion two more 
terraces lie beyond the Wabash Ridge. 
* Sixteenth Ann. Report of Indiana State Geologist, 1888, p. 123. 
My attention was first called to the remarkable series of terminal moraines in 
northeastern Indiana and northwestern Ohio by the work of Professor Charles R. 
Dryer in the summer of 1886. As assistant to the state geologist, Professor Dryer 
was at that time making a survey of the northeastern counties of Indiana. Some 
acquaintance with the features of eastern Indiana southward as far as southern Ran- 
dolph county and also with the region around Saginaw Bay in Michigan led me to 
extend the series provisionally, recognizing its probable incompleteness, to those 
regions. The idea that these moraines might mark precessional variations of climate 
was adopted by me then as a tentative hypothesis. The drift of opinion since then 
among American geologists, however, has been largely against anything like so 
