128 G. H. Stone — Glacial Sediments of Maine. 



4. Karnes ending in lacustrine deltas. — In hundreds of 

 places along the coast of Maine the writer has traced the 

 beaches of the sea up to a certain level and there lost them 

 altogether. The highest beach that I can find is at an eleva- 

 tion of 225 to 230 feet in the Kennebec region and 220 to 225 

 in eastern Maine. Beaches can be found at these elevations 

 on every hill that would be a projecting headland when the 

 sea stood at this level. Only a limited amount of erosion was 

 performed by the sea while it stood above its present level. 

 No terraces of erosion were made in the solid rock that I have 

 been able to recognize. On the most exposed headlands the 

 till was eroded and the glacial striae effaced from the bared 

 rock, but the roches moutonnees remain. A few miles north- 

 east of Machias on the south slope of a high hill a deep sheet 

 of till shows a cliff of erosion and a beach at about 225 feet. 

 The cliff is now much fallen, but estimating from the size of 

 the beach-terrace it could only have been from six to ten feet 

 high and the erosion did not in some places reach to the bot- 

 tom of the till. This occurred on a slope which would be 

 exposed to the full force of the Atlantic at that time. Above 

 this beach the hill rises two or three hundred feet and shows 

 nothing but ordinary unmodified till. For these and many 

 other reasons I assign the highest elevation of the sea on the 

 coast of Maine that occurred in late glacial or in post-glacial 

 time at about 280 feet above the present sea level. During 

 earlier glacial time the sea may for a time have stood at a 

 higher elevation. 



The deltas deposited in glacial lakes are situated above the 

 contour of 230 feet, and most of them are on the north sides 

 of hills where during the melting of the ice a lake would be 

 confined between the ice on the north and the hills lying to 

 the south. These deltas present the same horizontal sorting of 

 sediments as the marine deltas, except that they do not pass 

 by degrees into fossiliferous marine clay like those found 

 below 230 feet. 



5. Massive kame-plains. — These are somewhat rounded or 

 sometimes rather level on their tops. They contain no kettle- 

 holes proper though the surface may be rolling or uneven. 

 They show only an imperfect and irregular assortment of sedi- 

 ments from coarse on one side to fine on the other. They end 



marine deltas, to postulate masses of ice that occupied the places now repre- 

 sented by kettle-holes. 



In my paper on the kames of Maine, read before the Boston Society of Natural 

 History in 1880 I recognized that the plains here termed marine deltas of glacial 

 sediment were marine deposits, but I supposed they were composed of kames 

 re-classified by the sea. This was based on an exaggerated estimate of the ero- 

 sive action of the sea. As soon as I had proved that the sea waves of the epoch 

 wrought but a very limited amount of erosion it became evident that the plains 

 in question had been deposited in their present state in the sea. 



