214 The American Geologist. October, 1904. 
served and described. Their unique phase of terminal drift 
accumulation is the dwarf counterpart of the great moraine 
hills on other areas of our late and closing Wisconsin stages 
of the continental glaciation. 
The departure of this ice lobe was probably very rapid, 
like the final melting of the icefields from the areas of lake 
Agassiz and of the great lakes tributary to the St. Lawrence. 
The land had sunk from its high elevation that caused the 
ice accumulation, and the glacial recession uncovering this 
southern part of the Puget sound basin, which had then nearly 
its present altitude and a climate probably as warm as now, 
may have occupied no more than a few centuries. 
Within- so brief a part of the Champlain epoch, or time 
of land depression and final ice melting, which comprised the 
moraine-forming stages of waning glaciation, grandly repre- 
sented in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and eastward to 
New England, the "mound prairies" of Washington received 
their knolly gravel, the Steilacoom sand and gravel plains 
were spread in front of the retreating ice border, and the modi- 
fied drift and till of the Tacoma and Seattle hills were deposited 
from the englacial and at last superglacial drift. The mounds, 
the plains, and the plateaus and hills, were successively formed 
or overspread by their drift, but, as I think, with no long 
intervals of separation, all the series being closely consecutive. 
TECTONIC GEOGRAPHY OF EASTERN ASIA. 
Reviews and Translations by William Herbert Hobbs, 
Madison, Wis. 
III. JAPAN. (First Paper.) 
PLATE XIV. 
In earlier papers of this series^ have been treated, first, the 
interior plateau (Landstaffeln) of the Pacific coast of Asia as 
it has been described by von Richthofen ; and. second, the 
significance of the eastern coast line of the continent in the 
view of the same writer, together wuth more detailed examina- 
tion of IVIanchuria and Korea through reviews of papers by 
von Cholnoky and Koto. There remain for consideration the 
♦This journal for August and September, 1904-. 
