204 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



liardlv be explained away by the supposition that during the 

 lake stages the region where they occur was covered by the 

 glacier so as to prevent deposition and that the ice retreated 

 in such a way as, at once, to admit the marine fauna to the 

 area, for when the ice front was as far south in the Champlain 

 valley as the Saranac, it still had a long retreat to make before 

 a passage would have been open through the Missisquoi region 

 for the entrance of the sea with the Labradoran fauna. Before 

 this could happen some nonmarine sediment most likely would 

 have been deposited particularly near the mouths of streams, 

 off which both of the localities here cited then lay. It seems 

 more likely that this belt between 300 feet and 350 feet was 

 so far from the lake shores as not to receive contributions of 

 sand and gravel there being no tide to augment the offshore 

 scouring, and that the clays were carried by the circulation of 

 the waters to other parts of the lake floor. 



Cut cliff in till near Port Kent. At only one point on the New 

 York shore of Lake Champlain have I recognized what appears 

 to be an old sea cliff entirely cut by waves. This cliff has been 

 cut in a thick mass of till on the northwest flank of Trembleau 

 mountain midway between Port Kent and Keeseville. The cliff 

 may be seen at the old tollgate, now abandoned, on the direct 

 road between the places named. The base of this cliff is prac- 

 tically at the level of one of the elevated stages of the delta 

 of the Ausable river. According to the local contour of the 

 United States Geological Survey atlas sheet the base of the 

 cliff is about 330 feet above the present sea level. 



The cliff is somewhat less than 100 feet high and extends for 

 fully a third of a mile. It is a conspicuous object in the land- 

 scape from any point of view on the north and east because of 

 the contrast of its somewhat ravined face with the smoothened 

 or horizontally lined slojjes which form its topographic setting. 



1 hold this to be a wave-cut rather than a stream-cut bank 

 or cliff for the reason that the slopes of this mass of till, high 

 above the cliff, exhibit numerous water levels showing that the 

 ice sheet had retreated from this vicinity long before the cliff 

 cutting began. It is to be presumed that this cliff was the 

 work of waves during the marine invasion. Certainly those 

 which acted on the higher parts of this till mass, either had no 



