EXAMPLES OF JOINT-CONTROLLED DRAINAGE FROM 

 WISCONSIN AND NEW YORK 



WILLIAM HERBERT HOBBS 

 University of Wisconsin 



I. THE RICHLAND CENTER QUADRANGLE OF WISCONSIN 



A neighboring district to the one under consideration and border- 

 ing on the upper Mississippi has been cited by Daubree 1 as one where 

 the influence of joints upon drainage lines has been manifested in a 

 striking manner. 



Scattered and cuboidal blocks (bluffs and knolls) resemble ruins, deep 

 crevasses, networks of nearly vertical valleys, of which the picturesque form 

 strikes all of the travelers to the upper Mississippi. 1 



Farther up the Wisconsin, Van Hise has ascribed the location of 

 the well-known Dells, or side valleys, to the position of joint planes 

 within the underlying rocks. 2 Subsequently Buckley 3 has made an 

 extended study of joint planes developed in the quarry rocks of the 

 state as respects their bearings, which he has summarized as follows : 



The joints in the sedimentary rocks strike in four main directions. The 

 prevailing general direction of the joints is northeast and southwest. The other 

 directions are northwest and southeast, east and west, and north and south. 



Inspection of Buckley's map discloses the fact that the diagonal 

 bearings do not represent single, but several joint series. 



Under the writer's direction, Mr. E. C. Harder, a member of the 

 senior class of the University of Wisconsin, has undertaken an inves- 

 tigation of the joint series which are developed within the Paleozoic 

 rock formations of southwestern Wisconsin, and has noted corre- 

 spondences in orientation between the drainage lines and the joint 

 planes. The investigation has covered districts distributed over an 



1 Geologie experimentale (Paris, 1879), Vol. I, pp. 337, 355 — 57- 



2 C. R. Van Hise, "The Origin of the Dells of the Wisconsin," Transactions of 

 the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, Vol. X (1895), pp. 556-60. 



3 E. R. Buckley, Bulletin IV, Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, 

 1898, pp. 456-60. 



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