220 



NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



and valorous exploits is sufficiently memorialized in American 

 geography by the beautiful lake which bears it, without his 

 patronymic being seized on as the designative of geologic events 

 of which he must have been ignorant. 



The ancient name of Lake Champlain, Lake of the Iroquois, 1 

 has in recent years been applied to the great ice-dammed glacial 

 lake which in the Ontario basin preceded the marine invasion. 

 The name Quebec now obsolete and replaced by standard 

 names is still retained by the Canadian geologists as a local 

 designative; its use in Pleistocene geology would be ill advised 

 on account of the history of the term as recorded in the literature 

 of North American geology. The only safe course, it would 

 therefore seem, is to propose the adoption of a name free from 

 the entanglements of meaning and the confusion which surround 

 the names Champlain, Quebec and Laurentian. The best studied 

 section of these marine fossiliferous beds is that of Montreal, the 

 ancient site of which city was occupied by the Indian settlement 

 of Hoehelaga. It is therefore proposed to call the deposits of 

 this marine invasion the Hochelagan formation and the subepoch 

 or stage of their time of deposition as the Hochelagan, a phase 

 which follows the Wisconsin with its late lacustrine stages con- 

 temporaneous with the departing ice sheet. 



HISTORY OF OPINION CONCERNING THE SOUTHERN EXTENSION OF THE 



MARINE CONDITIONS 



Once the marine origin of the fossiliferous clays in the Cham- 

 plain valley was recognized, the difficulty of separating these de- 

 posits from other similar materials naturally led to the conclusion 

 that the marine waters passed through one or more of the narrow 

 straits separating the Champlain from the Hudson valley and 

 thence continued to the ocean on the south. The following writ- 

 ings and their dates are given only as an illustration of the history 

 of ideas. The latter two by Upham and Baldwin anticipate the 

 present report. 



The views of the earlier Vermont geologists concerning the 

 southward extension of the marine invasion is expressed in a 



1 The Indian name of Lake Champlain is stated to have been Caniaderi- 

 Guarunte. Kanyatare is Mohawk for lake. Doc. Hist, of State of N. Y. 

 1850. 3:1190. 



