Febbuabt 14, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



249 



that it gives force to the idea that all typi- 

 cal kames are formed by streams debouch- 

 ing into water bodies, and sometimes by 

 subglacial streams under hydraulic pres- 

 sure. Streams debouching on the land 

 would naturally produce either outwash 

 plains or valley trains. The fact that 

 basins or kettles, believed to be due to melt- 

 ing out of buried ice blocks, are usually 

 abundant in areas of kames, seems to prove 

 that the materials were laid down in stand- 

 ing water in close association with the stag- 

 nant ice margin, either on the ice or in hol- 

 lows and valleys and reentrants in the ice. 



Extraglacial: Outwash Plains. — These 

 are the gravel and sand deposits spread out 

 in front of the glacier by the outflow of the 

 glacial streams and which can not be 

 classed on the one hand as deltas or on the 

 other as valley trains. Water-laid drift in 

 facial contact or close association with the 

 moraines and which can not be distin- 

 guished either as delta, kame or valley 

 train, may safely be put in the indefinite 

 class of outwash gravel plains. North of 

 the divide where built in lalces they grade 

 into deltas and kames. South of the divide 

 they constitute most of the valley fillings, 

 especially of the broader valleys which lay 

 athwart the direction of ice flow. 



A not uncommon feature of the gravel 

 plains and one which shows the close rela- 

 tion to the glacier front, is the existence of 

 ice-bloek kettles. The term "pitted plain" 

 has been applied to the sand plains with 

 numerous kettles. Another feature indi- 

 cating their genesis is the preservation in 

 some cases of the ice-contact slope. The 

 outwash sand and gravel plains are more 

 common in the southwest part of the state 

 and in the Mohawk Valley. In the high- 

 lands the drainage was too free and vigor- 

 ous. In the Champlain-Hudson Valley, 

 lower levels, the sea-level waters distrib- 

 uted the glacial stream detritus, or it was 



buried under the deluge of sand contributed 

 by the rivers since the ice disappeared. 

 The very extensive sandplains on both 

 sides of the Hudson River and Lake Cham- 

 plain, for example, the Saratoga district, 

 must be classed as marine deltas. But on 

 the walls of the great valley above the ma- 

 rine plain Woodworth has noted ice-contact 

 slopes of glacial outwash deposits. In the 

 Susquehanna district Tarr found numer- 

 ous plains of this class. 



Extraglacial: Valley-Trains. — South of 

 the divide, where the drainage had free es- 

 cape, some detrital filling of the valleys is 

 common and occasionally abundant. The 

 high-level flood plains along the valley sides 

 and the elevated deltas of lateral tribu- 

 taries testify to the glacial floods and their 

 burden of detritus. The deposit by gla- 

 cial flow is of course intermingled with and 

 in places buried under land stream detritus. 

 The valley trains may be regarded as head- 

 ing in outwash plains, and one might re- 

 gard the glacial gravel deposits in the entire 

 length of the valleys north of the terminal 

 moraine as outwash. This view would re- 

 strict the true valley-trains to the fillings of 

 valleys beyond the terminal moraine or 

 reach of the ice sheet. In this latter view 

 the valley-train drift would occur in New 

 York only along the south side of Long Is- 

 land, and in the small area south of the 

 Alleghany Eiver. 



Herman L. Faiechild 



University of Eochester 



(To he concluded,') 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS 

 Professor Willy Wien, of Wiirzburg, will 

 deliver at Columbia University, during the 

 month of April, a series of lectures on recent 

 developments in theoretical physics. Professor 

 Wien received the Nobel prize in physics in 

 1911 and is well known for his researches in 

 radiation and the electrical constitution of 

 matter. 



