70 PROCEEDINGS OF THE PRINCETON MEETING 



So far as could be determined in a reconnaissance trip, all these drumlins 

 seem to be comiiKjsed of drift. No rock-dnimlins or drumlin-like forms carved 

 out of rock were noted. 



The belt of north-south drumlins extending southward from Thompsons 

 Lake to the Catskills is separated into two parts by a pronounced escarpment, 

 developed on Hamilton rocks, which runs eastward along the south side of the 

 valley of Fox Creek from Schoharie to Countryman Hill. This escarpment 

 opposed a considerable topographic barrier to the ice movement, and in turn 

 suffered severe glacial erosion, as is evidenced by the strong rock fluting which 

 it now displays. The lower noi*th-south passes through the escarpment suf- 

 fered most. Harder ledges resisted erosion, while the overlying softer shales 

 were stripped away until the hillsides were carved into a series of steplike 

 terraces, smooth and straight and inclining southward with the dip of the 

 rocks, each terrace marking the outcrop of a resistant rock layer. One valley 

 in particular along our route — about 2i^ miles southeast of East Berne — shows 

 this feature especially clearly. The valley, which constitutes a pass through 

 the escarpment, is U-shaped and about three-fourths of a mile wide at the 

 bottom. The valley bottom in its northern part, near the edge of the escari>- 

 ment. is rock only thinly veneered with drift, while the sides are beautifully 

 fluted. A little over half a mile to the south a large, complex drumlin mass 

 rears itself to a height nearly as great as that of the rocky and fluted valley 

 walls on either side — an interesting juxtaposition of erosional and construc- 

 tional glacial featui-es. From here south to Catskill Creek the drumlins domi- 

 nate the landscape, becoming broader, shorter, and more variable in direction 

 as one goes farther south, until near Catskill Creek some of them are nearly 

 round. 



South of Catskill Creek a number of rounded hills, in which no rock ex- 

 posures could be found, appear to be drumlins. Here the drumlins seem to 

 exhibit a strange indecision as to which direction to take, but show on the 

 whole a tendency to diverge along two lines, one running southwest toward 

 the pass south of Mount Pisgah and the other southeast along the eastern 

 front of the Catskills — probably in response to divergent ice-currents occa- 

 sioned by the Catskill escai-pment. 



Throughout the area described above there seems to be surprisingly little 

 true moraine. A few masses, one just west of ReidsvlUe and another a mile 

 south of Medusa, were noted, but on the whole drumlins constitute the domi- 

 nant glacial features. 



The region as a whole presents a beautiful example of ice-molded topog- 

 raphy of both the constructional and the destructional types and records in 

 the clearest manner the splitting of the ice-currents against the northeastern 

 angle of the plateau into a soutli-flowing stream in the Hudson Valley and a 

 westward-flowing stream in the valley of the Mohawk.^ 



Presented by title in the absence of the author. 



21 After this paper had gone to the publishers the writer discovered, under the heading 

 "Work in Progress." in the report of the Director of the New York State Museum 

 (Bulletin No. 149, page 18), a notice to the effect that Prof. A. P. Brigham had visited 

 a part of the region here described, had noted the diverging dnimlinoid forms, and had 

 put on them the interpretation of diverging ice flow in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. 

 Professor Brigham's results are not as yet published- The observations and interpreta- 

 tions here presented may therefore be looked upon as independent confirmation of Pro- 

 fessor Brigham's interpretation. 



