330 FRA NK BURS LEY TA YL OR 



filled the whole valley up to the contour of about i , 1 1 or i , 1 20 

 feet, according as one or another of two outlets was active. 

 Geographical considerations, which ought to control wherever 

 possible, would suggest Lake Hoosic as the most appropriate 

 name for this body of water. Professor T. Nelson Dale, who 

 has described certain features which he attributes to this lake, 

 has called it Lake Bascom in published notices. But I shall use 

 the geographical name as being decidedly better. One of the 

 effects of Lake Hoosic was to obliterate and render unrecog- 

 nizable the deposits of the ice-front where its halts rested in 

 the northern, deeper part. This greatly increased the difficulty 

 of distinguishing the successive halts in that part of the area. 



If the ice-front had retreated from northwest to southeast, 

 instead of in the opposite direction, the Hoosic would have been 

 the valley of free drainage with valley trains of gravel, and the 

 Housatonic, Westfield, and Farmington valleys would have had 

 the lakes with deltas. The fact that, excepting in one small part 

 where there are deltas, the Housatonic has only valley trains, 

 and that the Westfield and Farmington have the same, while the 

 Hoosic valley has deltas and lake clays, but no valley trains, 

 accords well with the evidence of striae and bowlder transporta- 

 tion, showing that the ice-front did in fact retreat in a general 

 direction from southeast to northwest. 



EVIDENCES BY WHICH THE RECESSIONAL HALTING PLACES 

 OF THE ICE-FRONT VV^ERE DETERMINED. 



While the general retreat was going on across this region, the 

 ice-front halted many times and formed a series of recessional 

 moraines corresponding in a general way with the recessional 

 moraines of the Great-Lake lobes in the West, except that they 

 are very fragmentary and relatively faint and slender. The suc- 

 cessive individuals are also on the average more closely spaced, 

 the average interval between the halts in Berkshire county being 

 about three and one-half miles, and they are all intensely sinuous 

 in their courses. 



There are, however, other classes of deposits which assist 

 very materially in determining the place of the ice-border. 



