October 18, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



617 



of beats ; when the beats are comparatively fre- 

 quent, he speaks of ' roughness ' ; but the psy- 

 chologist does not arbitrarily call roughness 

 'discord.' Upon the cause of discord the psy- 

 chologists have not agreed ;.it is as yet unknown 



— at least to the psychologists. 



Max Meyer. 

 University of Missouri. 



a correction. 

 In Science for September 27, 1901, I called 

 attention to a signature of a work entitled 

 ' Florula Lexingtoniensis,' which I then sup- 

 posed to be a work of C. S. Rafinesque. There 

 is now no dou.bt that the signature in question is 

 part of a work with the same title which ap- 

 peared in the Transylvania Journal of Medicine, 

 under the authorship of C. W. Short. The sig- 

 nature bad been repaged, and does not have the 

 appearance of a journal extract. 



William J. Fox. 

 Academy of Natural Sciences 

 OF Philadelphia, Pa. 



CURRENT NOTES ON PHYSIOGRAPHY. 

 MT. KTAADN. 



Two visits to Mt. Ktaadn (5,150^) in northern 

 Maine and four ascents have convinced Tarr that 

 even the summit of the mountain has been 

 glaciated, for fragments of schist, argillite and 

 sandstone were found on its granite peaks 

 (' Glaciation of Mt. Ktaadn, Maine,' Bull. Oeol. 

 Soc. Amer., XI., 1900, pp. 433-448, 10 pi.). 

 The greater part of the top is occupied by a 

 ' tableland ' surmounted by the several summits 

 and gnawed into by huge basin headed valleys 

 or corries, whose smooth and precipitous walls 

 can hardly be scaled. Little talus lies in the 

 basins, but a number of rock-basin lakes and 

 terminal moraines were found on the valley 

 floors. Where the basins come close together 

 they are separated by sharp ridges, whose 

 ruggeduess Tarr accounts for by the moderate 

 destructive action of the upper part of the ice 

 sheet, as well as by postglacial weathering. He 

 suggests that large local glaciers radiated from 

 Ktaadn after the time of general glaciation. 



Following the views of Richter, de Martonne 

 and Matthes, recently noted in these columns, 

 and the still earlier views of Johnson, the steep 



walls and sharp dividing ridges between the 

 Ktaadn corries would be ascribed to the retro- 

 gressive erosion of their local glaciers, aided by 

 the excessive frost action of the Bergschrund 

 belt ; and the ' tableland ' would be regarded 

 as a residual of a larger preglacial dome. 



NORWEGIAN FIORDS. 



The year-book of the Norwegian geological 

 survey for 1900 (' Norges geologiske Underso- 

 gelse,' No. 32-, Aarbogfor 1900, Kristiania, 1901, 

 p. 263, many sketches and an English summary), 

 contains an account of two important landslips 

 in postglacial clays and a general discussion of 

 the relief of certain typical areas. The highlands 

 are regarded as presenting traces of two cycles 

 of erosion ; the older appears in the lofty snow- 

 covered plateaus, more or less mountainous ; 

 the younger in the broad, open, high-level val- 

 leys among the high plateaus. The deeper 

 valleys, whose deepest distal portions contain 

 the fiords, are of later origin, after a great up- 

 heaval of the land, and are probably the work 

 of water and ice in several interglacial and 

 glacial epochs. Regarding the relative propor- 

 tions of ice and water work, Reusch appeals to 

 certain fiorded valleys, in whose walls a num- 

 ber of ravines have been produced by ordinary 

 subaerial erosion. In such cases, the valleys 

 must have been, Reusch thinks, worn nearly to 

 their present depth before the ravines could have 

 been formed. Hence "the glaciers enlarged 

 the main valley and partly destroyed the side 

 valleys, but they cannot be said to have made 

 the main valley." But this conclusion leaves 

 the problem in a quandary ; for if the ravines 

 indicate the preglacial depth of the main val- 

 ley, it is difficult to understand why certain 



hanging lateral valleys, whose streams are much 

 larger than those in the ravines, were not also 



