Moraines with Raised Beaches of Lake Erie. 19 
forms seem to have been somewhat modified by the action of 
waves or currents of water. This is considered a possible lake 
level or perhaps a lake outlet. There is a large amount of 
gravelly drift in this belt but so far as discovered it is not 
arranged in beach lines, the surface being either plane or hay- 
ing a gentle undulation as if the drift knolls had suffered 
reduction or modification by waves or currents. This gravelly 
drift occupies usually a breadth of two or three miles. In 
places it occupies the entire interval between the Lockport 
moraine and the drumlin belt which les north of it. At the 
southern end of these drumlins for a few miles west from the 
Genesee river, knolls and ridges of morainic type occur, and 
these are frequently bordered by gravelly aprons or delta-like 
accumulations; near the western end of the drumlin belt, also 
in the vicinity of Careyville, Genesee county, there is a gravel 
plain dotted with basins. These features are thought to indi- 
eate that the ice-sheet for a time occupied the drumlin area 
and country to the north but did not extend so far south as to 
completely bar out the water from the Lake Erie basin. It 
may, at times, have covered the gravelly belt while at other 
times it may have afforded an eastward outlet along the south 
border of the ice-sheet.* 3 
Still later the ice-sheet halted along a line just north of the 
drumlin belt, as is indicated by a small moraine which follows 
quite closely the line of the Erie canal from Rochester west- 
ward to Albion. (Its course has not been determined west 
from Albion.) South from this moraine there are, in the 
vicinity of the Genesee valley, quite heavy deposits of sand 
capping the drumlins and the plains among them. The sand 
extends north to the south border of this moraine but does not 
overspread it. This limitation of the sand is thought to be an 
indication that the ice-sheet was occupying the moraine at that 
time. The phenomena indicate that the ice-sheet held a nar- 
row body of water in the Genesee valley and this may also 
have had an extension along the ice front some distance east 
and west, between this moraine and the elevated country to 
the south. It is not yet known whether it afforded, at that 
time, an outlet to the Mohawk valley. , 
The district between the Lockport moraine and the Iroquois 
beach presents other features which, when fully understood, 
promise to throw light upon the relation of the ice-sheet to 
the lake. We take time to mention the features of but one 
locality. North from the western end of the drumlin belt 
* Prof. H. L. Fairchild has recently published the opinion (this Journal, vol. 
xlix, Feb., 1895, pp. 156-157), that there was a temporary outlet from the eastern 
end of the Lake Erie basin through Seneca Lake to the Susquehanna, near Elmira. 
-Prof. Fairchild’s studies, now in progress, promise to shed light upon this and 
other questions connected with the lake outlets and the descent of the lake from 
the Crittenden to the Iroquois beach. 
