Perry.] 126 [February 28, 
Connecticut valley glacier, as distinguished from the former, is hardly 
the fact. Besides, such a comparison is out of place, for it disposes 
us to look at the subject from a wrong point of view. So it may be 
surely questioned whether “its underflowing streams” performed so 
imporiant a work as is here‘ascribed to them. That the waters from 
the wasting ice here and there, in some measure, rounded and 
smoothed any angular stones over which they flowed, is of course 
true. The very word employed, “streams,” implies that they were 
limited, affecting a small surface, and that they were not broad ex- 
panses of water covering, moulding and shaping the whole or almost 
the entire surface. While willing to admit that they produced their 
legitimate results in the channels which they occupied, I am con- 
vinced that they worked over and modified the drift, so as to give it 
a stratified form beneath the glacier, only to a very small extent. A 
prominent tendency of a stream under such circumstances, is to- 
wear, denude and remove. Of course, it would work over, assort, 
and in places partially arrange such material as lay in its way. It 
might, and no doubt did take up matter in its entire course, espec- 
ially from beneath the end, and from the front of the elacier, and 
bear it to lower levels—to the levels and depressions lying at a dis- 
tance from the melting ice. In them the stratified deposit would be 
laid down as we find it; sometimes with considerable regularity, and 
often very irregularly, because of the thousand breaks and eddies 
that were sure to occur in such a state of things; also because of the 
annual freshets, which would carry down large quantities_of ice, 
block up the gorges, raise the water to higher levels in the basins, 
and thus cause manifold vicissitudes with all their legitimate ac- 
companiments. 
The view here presented may suggest the true origin and explana- 
tion of some of those irregularities in the stratified beds of sand, 
which are usually regarded as marine, and are often cited as evi- 
dence of varying oceanic currents, of the flux and reflux of the tides, 
of the antagonism that prevailed in estuaries, between the out-flow- 
ing streams of the main land and the in-rushing waves of the ocean. 
While all these kinds of action occur under their appropriate condi- 
tions and relations, and while they produce a great variety of ap- 
parent anomalies, I fail to find any satisfactory evidence that they 
were operative in the formation of the beds in question. Any one 
who has carefully watched a great freshet in spring-time; who has 
observed the setting back of the waters of a river, by the damming 
