Art. I.] Fowke, Pre- Glacial Drainage near Cincinnati 5 
down ; but presently the valley was completely closed and the 
imprisoned waters found no escape until they had reached the 
level of the col at (K), on the divide between Sugar creek 
and Kentucky river. 
This narrow pass, however, was much too small to carry 
off the drainage of many thousands of square miles, and its ca- 
pacity was still further decreased by ice-bergs carried hither by 
the currents and gorged between its walls so the water accumu- 
lated until only the tops of the higher hills remained above its 
surface. Blocks of ice, broken from the glacier front, floated 
about in the lake, most of them depositing within a compara- 
tively short distance the glacial debris which they carried ; oth- 
ers, much smaller perhaps, drifted many miles before they 
grounded on a drowned hill-top and left a boulder or a mass of 
gravel to puzzle a future geologist by its isolated position, so 
far from any moraine. 
As the lake rose, other outlets would be reached at various 
levels higher than the col at Sugar creek ; finally the overflow 
would balance the accumulation. When the new channel was 
cleared of ice, and torn wider and deeper by a torrent like Ni- 
agara, the lake would begin to recede, the minor outlets would 
be abandoned, and all the discharge pass through the Sugar 
creek gap. 
At this stage began the readjustment of drainage channels. 
The first change was in that part farthest west. Kanawha, shut 
off from its natural outlet toward the west, turned into Lick- 
ing ; followed that valley southward to Hamilton ; turned into 
Laughery creek ; and thus reached the gorge at (K). But the 
stream was to have short tenure of its new quarters ; the ad- 
vancing ice soon choked up the mouth of the Licking, and 
Kanawha was again deprived of an outlet. A second lake was 
formed, including the basin of Kanawha and all its tributaries 
east of Licking. The Monongahela, in pre-glacial times, had 
its outlet in the present Lake Erie ; it, too. had been shut off, 
and compelled to break a way from its old bed at Beaver, 
Penn., to the Kanawha at Huntington, West Va. At whatever 
time this occurred, it was certainly previous to the formation of 
