226 The American Geologist. October, 1903. 
the most massive morainic deposits in the Northwest, situated 
nearly five hundred miles north of the drift boundary. These 
great moraines seem very probably correlative, in their date of 
accumulation, with the outermost moraines of New Jersey and 
Long Island, on or very near to the extreme drift margin, as 
was once suggested to me by Leverett, which would place the 
beginnings of lakes Agassiz and Warren slightly earlier than 
that of lake Hudson-Champlain. But this glacial lake, existing 
first near the site of New York city, had grown northward 
along the Hudson valley, following the glacial retreat, until it 
reached probably to the vicinity of Albany, before lake Warren 
was succeeded by lake Iroquois. The ensuing duration of the 
latter lake coincided with the farther growth of lake Hudson- 
Champlain along all the Champlain basin ; and lake St. Law- 
rence, in its expansion to Quebec, continued with the same out- 
flow by the mouth of the Hudson. All the moraines of New 
York and New England, as partly traced by Chamberlin, Fair- 
child, Hitchcock, Shaler, W r oodworth, and the present writer, 
excepting the outermost on Long Island, Martha's Vineyard, 
and Nantucket, besides other moraines to be traced in Canada,. 
were contemporaneous with these lakes. Any single moraine, 
or drumlin, kame, or short esker, could therefore have required 
no more than a few years or decades for its formation, with 
the recession of the ice-sheet past its situation, while even the 
most prolonged esker series of Maine would be formed in a 
few centuries. 
Absence of marine fossils in the beds of modified drift over- 
lying the glacial drift on the shores of southern New England, 
Long Island, and New Jersey, and water courses which ex- 
tend from the terminal moraine on Long Island southward 
across the adjacent modified drift plain and continue beneath 
the sea level of the Great South bay and other bays between the 
shore and its bordering long beaches, prove that this coast 
stood somewhat higher than now when the ice-sheet there ex- 
tended to its farthest limit. Its greater elevation was maintained 
while the ice receded, and sufficed to hold the water of the 
Hudson valley at a little hight above the sea, as probably twen- 
ty-five or fifty feet. It seems certain that this was a lake, as its 
deposits along all the Hudson valley have no marine fossils. 
The upper limit of these deposits rises gradually northward, 
