470 
BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY 
Branch, below which it is a large canoeable smoothwater and 
Stillwater sand-bottomed stream winding amid meadows and 
alder-intervales down to the Forks (1175 feet above the sea) 
southeast of Forks Mountain. 
The other branch of the North Pole, the larger stream, I have 
not yet seen above the Forks. The courses of the streams in the 
map are in part from the timber-line maps and in part supplied 
by Mr. Braithwaite, who tells me there are granite gorges ledger 
and falls on the streams shown cn the map. I am inclined to 
think the main stream above Forks Mountain is very sluggish, for 
a lumberman has told me there is a deadwater or narrow lake, 
four miles long, on the upper part of this stream. 
What now is the origin of these source streams of the North 
Pole Branch? Turning to the map, three facts are at once ap- 
parent. First, to some extent the valleys show evidence of that 
northwest-southeast parallelism so characteristic of the valleys of 
this whole central region. Thus there is a line of streams from 
near Malone Pond southeast along Portage Brook, which, as 
shown in an earlier note (No 87), probably connected Dunn, or 
Logan, Lake with the North Pole Branch, while both the Half 
Moon Lake Branch and the main stream fall in with this 
direction. I have little doubt that these valley directions are 
actually relics of the original system. Second, there are at least 
two valleys, the Hough Lake— Skunk Lake Valley and the Cave 
Brook valley, having a direction at right angles to the original 
system. These are very likely homologous with the part of the 
Tuadook below Crooked Deadwater (Note 86), the origin of 
which I cannot explain. Third, taken collectively, the source 
streams now form a fan-radiating system collecting finally into 
one trunk, draining a great radiating basin or circque, very 
similar to that of the Walkemik Basin d- scribed in an earlier note 
(No. 87). As in the Walkemik Basin also, the erosion of so 
many streams appears to have greatly reduced the elevation of 
the parts of the plateau originally separating them, reducing 
them for the most part (though with an exception in the case of 
the great ridge-like Forks Mountain, which must be still of 
nearly the Plateau height), to low ridges and hills. That such 
