Karly Drainage Adjustments. 103 
began a career of conquest and the original streams were succes- 
sively diverted to southern courses. There are indications in 
the extreme southern portion of the province that the drainage 
was more immediately turned to and longer held in consequent 
courses by the folding than elsewhere. This may have been due 
to the occurrence of -broad synclinal troughs whose axes have a 
decided southward pitch. There are at present a few synclinal 
streams in this region and during the Cretaceous cycle the num- 
ber and size of such must have been considerably greater; but 
even here the drainage had probably become so far adjusted 
that the main streams had subsequent courses upon the anti- 
clinal axes. In the central portion of the province the Cum- 
berland river probably drained a portion of the Appalachian 
valley in southwestern Virginia, holding its antecedent course 
through Cumberland gap and flowing into the extreme end of 
the Mississippi embayment. 
The conquest of axial over transverse streams progressed at 
a diminishing rate toward the northeast as far as the New- 
_Kanawha, which had sunk its antecedent channel sufficiently 
deep for its own protection. 
Thus at the close of the cycle nearly the whole of the Appa- 
lachian valley southward’ from the New-Kanawha constituted 
a single drainage system whose main trunk was a large river 
flowing southwestward into the Cretaceous sea and occupying 
very nearly the present position of the Coosa river. The present 
writers propose the name Appalachian river for this Mesozoic 
stream, since it was almost entirely limited to the Appalachian 
valley and drained more than half the area of the valley within 
this province. 
Drainage of central Kentucky and Tennessee—In most of the 
region west of the Appalachian river basin the strata are so 
nearly horizontal that stream adjustment produced but little 
modification in the original drainage. The rivers of central 
Kentucky and Tennessee haye shifted their channels under the 
influence of more recent surface warping, but at the close of the Cre- 
taceous cycle they probably flowed directly down a gently sloping 
surface toward the Mississippi embayment. Many of them were 
the beheaded lower courses of those streams which originally 
flowed from the highlands on the east, but had been robbed of 
their upper drainage basins by the subsequent Appalachian 
river, 
15—Nart. Geog. Maa., von. VI, 1894. 
