SHELBY COUNTY. 461 



at the present time, are some fine beds of washed gravel, showing the 

 effect of moving water in varying circumstances of force and velocity. 

 Near Port Jefferson is the best example of gravel beds of this description 

 in the county. It occurs at the junction of two valleys now threaded by 

 two brooks, the shrunken successors of broad streams of former remote 

 ages. Here are the wide channels which they cut, wide compared with 

 the small paths of the creeks which now meander by a struggling course 

 to reach the river channel. At the point of land where these two waters 

 joined, and where their streams mingled with that of the Miami, is a 

 grand deposit of alternating layers of gravel and sand, heaped up thirty 

 or forty feet deep and exposed now, by the removal of the extreme point 

 to a width of about one hundred feet. When one or the other, or both, 

 the streams which excavated the unequal channels (for one greatly ex- 

 ceeds the other in magnitude) which join at this point, were swollen 

 and were carrying onward a ioad of ^and and gravel, as well as clay, and 

 meeting here, and one spreading over the valley of the other, if un- 

 swoUen, or both widening as they entfred the broad valley of the river 

 and losing a part of their momentum and carrying-power, they deposited 

 a portion of their freight at the point of junction where the rapidity of 

 the current was first checked. In these strata can be read the history of 

 the currents which flowed here, and left their records, not in rocks, but in 

 sands. There is first, in nearly horizontal layers, a succession of strata 

 composed of clean gravel (the lowest exposed at the time of my visit, 

 the lower had been covered previously), then one of coarse, gray sand ; 

 another next of fine sand; then ten feet of sand finely stratified; then- 

 to the top alternating layers of gravel and sand. After thf se layers now 

 referred to were deposited, another deposit of clean gravel was made, not 

 parallel with these, but covering the ends of all of them from the highest 

 to the lowest. I will simply refer to another deposit of gravel, near the 

 south end of the iron bridge over the river south of Sidney. This large 

 accumulation is less available for road-making than it would have been 

 had it not become so cemented together by a deposit of carbonate of lime. 

 I distinguished from these beds of gravel that large accumulation, at a 

 lower level, and underlying the " river bottom," or the "second bottom," 

 exemplified by an accumulation of clean sand, used for building purposes, 

 just below the west end of the railroad bridge, east of Sidney, over the 

 Miami River, and perhaps underlying more or less the town of Sidney. 

 The broad excavation made by the Miami River through the drift of 

 this county and the counties above, has exposed to the transporting 

 action of water countless thousands of perches of sand and gravel which 

 have been removed down the course of this river, and even into the Ohio 



