510 
lands, so it must have left the State last in the 
lowlands. That necessitated the two great ice- 
lobes, one from the north and northwest and 
one from the northeast. The former occupied 
the basin of the Red river of the North and the 
Minnesota valley, and the latter the valley of 
Lake Superior with its western tributaries. 
These at length united in one general ice sheet, 
but when they retired they assumed again their 
lobate forms outlined by moraines, and finally 
allowed an uncovered interlobate area of the 
high lands about the region of the Upper Mis- 
sissippi. By the growth of this uncovered area 
the ice lobes shrank to smaller dimensions and 
disappeared entirely, the latest to finally leave 
the State being the northeastern lobe. 
The belt along which these ice lobes collided 
in the central part of the State can be traced 
by the overlapping and confusion in the charac- 
ters of the drift, the northwestern drift being 
normally gray and the northeastern red. This 
belt he marked out in general as continuing 
from Rice county to St. Paul, thence north- 
westwardly to the region of Itasca lake where 
it turns eastward, passes along the range 
known as Giant’s range, and leaves the State 
not far from the extremity of Pigeon point. 
Wherever these ice-lobes uncovered land that 
slopes northerly, or toward the ice itself, the 
discharged waters formed lakes whose outlets, 
beaches and areas are sometimes well known, 
the chief of which is Lake Agassiz, described 
by Mr. Warren Upham. Twenty-five other 
such lakes were defined by Professor Winchell 
within Minnesota, varying in elevation from 
890 feet to 1,700 feet above sea level. 
Mr. Upham, in his lecture on ‘The Giants’ 
Kettles in the Interstate Park,’ stated in sub- 
stance that within an area of two or three acres 
in the northern part of the Interstate Park 
are found about seventy rock potholes, or 
giants’ kettles, as they may be called in agree- 
ment with their common designation in the 
languages of Germany, Sweden and Norway. 
This area of their abundant occurrence is un- 
surpassed in respect to their numbers, depth 
and difficulty of explanation, by any other lo- 
cality in the world, although many places, as 
in Maine, nearly all the other New England 
States, the vicinity of Christiania, Norway, and 
SCIENCE. 
[N. 8S. Vou. XIII. No. 326. 
the Glacier Garden in Lucerne, have very re- 
markable giants’ kettles. 
At Taylor’s Falls they range in diameter 
from a foot or less to 25 feet, and in depth from 
one foot or a few feet to 65 feet and 84 feet, 
these being the depths to which two potholes 
25 feet apart have been excavated and sounded, — 
but without yet reaching to their bottoms. In 
many cases the ratio of diameter to depth is as 
1 to 5 or 1 to 7 with nearly cylindric, but occa- 
sionally somewhat spiral or rifle like, form. 
The rock is the very hard Keweenawan dia- 
base, scarcely exceeded in hardness by any 
known rock. From many features of these 
giants’ kettles, as notably their abrupt rims and 
the generally unworn adjoining rock surface, 
Mr. Upham attributed their erosion to torrent- 
falling through moulins, vertical shafts of the 
ice sheet which covered this region in the Gla- 
cial period. Some of these kettles were filled 
and covered by drift, but the greater number 
are empty, excepting scanty gravel at the bot- 
tom, with a few water-rounded boulders. The 
adequacy of moulin torrents to erode the 
smaller as well as the larger kettles is shown 
by small potholes of such origin, in some in- 
stances only about a foot or two in diameter 
and depth, on the high ridges and tops of hills 
and mountains in Maine, New Hampshire and 
Vermont. 
The above is but a brief summary of these 
two very instructive lectures which were de- 
livered to a large audience in the Academy 
Assembly Hall. 
F. G. WARVELLE. 
SHORTER ARTICLES. 
CHIASMODON IN THE INDIAN OCEAN. 
THE Indian government survey steamer In- 
vestigator, Captain T. H. Henning, R. N., com- 
manding, which has recently been engaged in 
beam-trawling off Cuddalore and Point Cali- 
mere on the southeast coast of India, has ob- 
tained a small specimen of the rare deep-sea 
fish, Chiasmodon niger Johnson, from a depth of 
1,100 fathoms. , 
This species has hitherto been known only 
from four localities in the Atlantic. It was 
first reported from the Madeira Islands in 1850, 
