474 . UR. P. F. KENDALL ON A SYSTEM OF [Aug. 1902, 
of the phenomena mentioned above. Mr. Warren Upham, in his 
masterly monograph upon the glacial Lake Agassiz,' has reviewed 
these criteria with his customary clearness; but, although his 
descriptions may be confidently recommended for study by British 
geologists, they deal with phenomena upon a scale of magnitude so 
far transcending that upon which such features are developed in 
Britain, that I am constrained to furnish a brief account more 
applicable to experience in this country. Moreover, Mr. Upham 
addresses a scientific public which is practically unanimous in 
accepting his premises of great confluent glaciers, and in rejecting 
the suggestion of marine action as a cause of the bulk of the 
Pleistocene deposits, whereas, in Britain, these views have not as 
yet received unanimous sanction. 
(1) Beaches.—The occurrence of beach-lines, whether con- 
sisting of detrital accumulations or of mere shore-scarps, is clear 
proof of the former presence of static waters; but no absolute 
proof, apart from included organisms, can be adduced to show 
whether sea- or fresh-water was the agent. 
The little Miarjelen See is margined by an excellently defined 
beach, consisting for the most part of an arrested talus of 
large angular blocks which have rolled or crept down the adjacent 
mountain-sides, with some blocks rafted out by floating ice. The 
upper level of the beach coincides with that of the col across which 
the overflow takes place, or did formerly take place (that is, before 
the great drainage-tunnel was made by the Cantonal authorities). 
The series of lakes in the Glen-Roy district was recognized solely 
by the evidence of such beaches, which form a series of sensibly 
horizontal benches along the mountain-sides, so conspicuous as to 
have become the subject of a popular legend. Mr. Jamieson 
demonstrated that they were the strand-lines of ice-dammed 
lakes, chiefly by the evidence of the coincidence of their respective 
altitudes with those of the cols across which drainage could have 
occurred. ‘The beaches of Lake Agassiz are upon a vast scale, and 
show a noteworthy deformation in a vertical sense: they do not 
consist of arrested talus merely, but are composed of sand and 
well-rolled shingle. Mr. Fox-Strangways found few signs of the 
beaches of his Lake Pickering; and I am unable to cite a single 
well-marked example in the Cleveland area, where, if the conditions 
had been favourable, there should be hundreds, each representing 
either a separate lake or a separate phase of a particular lake. 
Shore-scarps are quite common, but they are (with two or three 
exceptions) impersistent. I have seen in several places sections in 
these scarps, and these will be mentioned in the sequel. Some 
show well-bedded dirty gravel, and in others a rubble of angular 
and rounded fragments of local rock with some foreign stones, 
all resting against a greatly-shattered face of sandstone. Occa- 
sionally the hillsides are seen to be furrowed by many scarps 
half-obliterated by weathering or by the action of the plough, 
1 Monogr. U.S. Geol. Surv. vol. xxv (1896). 
