Lundy Beach and Birth of Lake Erie. 209 



constituted a spit between the Erie and Ontario basins, which 

 were connected by a broad sheet of open water. After 

 extending westward from the Niagara River for two or three 

 miles, the Lundy beach is interrupted by a low plain, but again 

 the strand skirts Font-hill (which rises about 300 feet above 

 Lake Erie) and trends southwestward. On the southeastern 

 side of the strait, the beach is equally characteristic, near 

 Ebenezer. It has been traced to Akron or about five miles 

 due north of Crittenden, where the Forest beach was surveyed 

 several years ago by Mr. Gilbert. 



At Ebenezer, the Lundy beach has an altitude of 660 feet 

 (bar.) above tide (Lake Erie being 573 feet) ; at Lundy Lane 

 the elevation is 687 feet (and the older knob 30 feet higher) ; 

 at Font-hill it is 675 feet (bar.); at Akron, the upper ridgelet 

 is 735 feet (bar.) or equivalent to the lower at 705 feet. Frag- 

 ments of beaches and terraces have been made known about 

 the head of Lake Ontario and also about the Erie basin, but 

 they have not been previously correlated with the Lundy 

 shore. The Lundy strand is between 140 and 155 feet below 

 the plain of the Forest beach, and it is usually from two to 

 five miles lakeward of it. Between the different strands of 

 Warren water, there is a slight deformation of the deserted 

 shores owing to the unequal terrestrial movement. A some- 

 what greater amount of warping is recorded between the 

 Forest and the Lundy beeches but the greatest amount of 

 deformation was after the dismemberment of Lundy Lake. 

 West of Cleveland, very little deformation of the old water- 

 lines has occurred. From the relation with the Forest beach, 

 the extension of Lundy Lake towards the west can be approxi- 

 mately delimited. The lake reached to Point Pelee and the 

 islands opposite. The eastern extension beyond Akron has 

 not been surveyed. But enough is known to mark the bound- 

 ary in the Erie basin ; and here we find the counterpart of the 

 Algonquin beach, of the basins of the upper lakes, whose 

 water plain was at substantially the same levels as the Lundy, 

 or about 150 feet below that of the Forest beach. The Lundy 

 water gives us the history of the lake basin between the 

 Warren episode and the nativity of Lake Erie. 



After the Lundy rest, the waters were gradually drained to 

 lower levels, until they were held in the Erie basin by a De- 

 vonian limestone escarpment, rising 20 or 30 feet above the 

 present outlet of Erie. The remains of another rocky bar- 

 rier, of 40 feet, now occurs over a mile north of the present 

 site of Niagara Falls. The country between these ridges is 

 low, so that there were pond-like expansions of the Niagara 

 until a recent date, when the falls cut through this William 



Am. Jour. Sci.— Third Series, Vol. XLVII, No. 279.— March, 1894. 

 14 



