with Raised Beaches of -Lake Erie. 299 



Parts of this moraine have been classed with the beaches by 

 early writers.* This confusion appears to have arisen mainly 

 from the imperfect knowledge of the phases of structure 

 which a moraine may present, especially in its gravelly and 

 sandy portions, though in one of the instances above cited a 

 large till ridge is called a beach. In the profile section from 

 Lake Erie to Grand river (Geo!, of Ohio, vol. ii, p. 62) the 

 southernmost of the four ridges, there shown, is this moraine. 

 The highest beach is there about 150 feet above Lake Erie 

 while the moraine is 260 feet. The beaches are narrow ridges 

 only a few rods in width, while the moraine has a width of 

 one-half mile or more. The beaches are composed of sand 

 and assorted material, the moraine of till, with occasional de- 

 velopments of gravelly knoll's. In places in Ashtabula county 

 the moraine and beach are closely associated, and beach sand 

 appears on the moraine, but through much of its course in 

 Ashtabula county as well as elsewhere the moraine is quite dis- 

 tinct from the beach and free from such deposits. Sand occa- 

 sionally caps the moraine in places where it was not encroached 

 upon by the beach, and that too at higher altitudes than por- 

 tions not thus coated. In such cases it may have been drifted 

 back from the shore by the wind. Some of it may however 

 have been deposited by waters attending the melting of the 

 ice-sheet, and be similar in origin to kames, rather than to 

 dunes or beaches. 



The Belmore beach has not been traced into close connection 

 with this moraine, but if we consider the lower terrace in East 

 Cleveland its correlative, the gap is nearly filled. In my 

 opinion there is no objection to this correlation since the height 

 of the lower terrace is slightly below that of the portion of 

 the Belmore beach immediately west of the Cuyahoga, being 

 about 165 feet, while the beach at the crossing of the C. C. C. 

 & St. L. R. R. is 170 feet above Lake Erie. It seems there- 

 fore that in this, as in the next older moraine, a moraine of 

 the eastern Erie basin, has in the western Erie basin, a beach 

 for its correlative. 



In the earlier beaches there is no question that the Lake 

 Erie basin has a southwesterly outlet into the Wabash river, 

 their altitude being slightly above that of this outlet, and the 

 beaches being open there, but the Belmore and later beaches 

 are below that level and do not open toward the outlet. We 

 must therefore look elsewhere for their outlet. It is evident 

 that it was not along the present route, nor by the Mohawk 

 valley, since the ice-sheet filled at this time the western portion 



* Second Geol. Surv. Penn., Q 4 , pp. 38, 39. Geol. of Ohio, vol. i, pp. 4SS-90, 

 518; vol. ii, pp. 60-63. 



