60 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE Voi.. XXVIli, 1921 
volume 24 of the American Journal of Science and so gave oppor- 
tunity to verify and extend their sections. These sections (3 and 
4) included drift clay overlying loess, on both sides of Court Ave- 
nue, between 10th and 11th streets. Their sections 1 and 2, on 
East 9th Street between Walnut and Court, showed loess over 
“vermillion-red clay containing a few pebbles of shale, 1 foot.” 
This clay rested on Carboniferous shale and was stated by them to 
be ‘hhe product of disintegration in situ (preglacial) of the sub- 
jacent shale.” It is worthy of note that nowhere do these men 
claim to have found a glacial drift beneath the loess. And it 
should be noted further that when the grade of Court Avenue was 
lowered in 1915 no subloessial drift was revealed, even where the 
cutting was extended downward into the shales of the Des Moines 
series of the Pennsylvanian. Only the drift sheet of the Wisconsin 
stage was present, overlying a thick body of interglacial loess, 
which in turn rested unconformably on geest, residual, . plainly, 
from the underlying shale. In view of recent statements that Mc- 
Gee and Call’s section included '‘Till ; dark red clay with abundant 
pebbles — 6 feet” and that “the south abutment (of the Court 
Avenue viaduct) rests on the more remote drift sheet,” (the Kan- 
san) (Annals of Iowa, July, 1920) careful attention surely should 
be paid to the facts as stated by McGee and Call and by Lees in 
the articles cited. 
The widespread extent of the Peorian loess over Capitol Hill 
at the time of the Wisconsin ice invasion is indicated by its being 
reached under twenty feet of Wisconsin pebbly till in the excava- 
tion for the new State Hpuse heating tunnel on East Grand Ave- 
nue at 12th Street, as well as by a similar discovery in the exca- 
vation for the heating plant for East High School, one-fourth of 
a mile northeast of the State House. It has been reached also in 
the lower ground to the north. 
A section which is in some respects of more interest than those 
already discussed, owing to its greater completeness, is an artifi- 
cial cutting on .West 5th Street. Here are to be found in fine de- 
velopment the Kansan till, the Peorian loess and the Wisconsin 
till. At Chestnut Street, where the cut begins, there was to be seen 
in November of 1920, above a variegated Coal Measure shale a 
yellowish bowldery till which was six to ten feet in thickness. Up- 
ward it graded into a red-brown sticky clay which for the most 
part contained but a. few pebbles and these very small, although 
locally pebbles were more abundant. Where this till was dry it 
