226 The American Geologist. April, i904. 
» 
were reduced, the land may have been buried under excessive 
falls of snow. Then, too, it mig^ht be asked by what law of 
nature did the winds confine their energy wholly to the flat, 
low-lying river bars while the higher and, supposedly, dryer 
mantle of till and beds of residual clay remained undisturbed 
to be gently, but deeply covered. 
Objection to the glacial origin of the loess has received its 
most convincing support from the repeated declaration of the 
absence of any barrier at or below Kansas City to retain a body 
of water of the depth required for building the blufifs to their 
present hight. But such a barrier did exist and still re- 
mains. The point where the Missouri river bends at Kansas 
City is, and apparently always has been, a drainage basin with 
its- only outlet towards the east. The water-shed tributary to 
the Missouri at float point attains altitudes above sea level rang- 
ing from looo to iioo feet within a distance of sixty miles. 
That of the union depot at Kansas City is only 750. The floods 
pouring in here from the vast drainage area on the west must 
have been met and held in check by the waters from the north 
in the manner shown by the lesser floods of the present age 
during the high water period in May of 1903. (See plate IX.) 
When the main current of the great flood was thus forced 
to change the direction of its flow the velocity must have been 
suddenly diminished to some degree, with the result of exces- 
sive precipitation of sediment at that point. 
As has been shown by professor G. Frederick Wright, in 
"The Nation" of December loth, 1903, this southern barrier 
continues eastward for a distance of about 300 miles, it being 
noted by him as the first beginnings of the Ozark uplift and the 
obvious cause of the abrupt eastward turn of the Missouri river. 
In the same article he has further shown that the narrowing 
of the gorge of the Missouri to two miles or less at a point be- 
low the mouth of the Osage necessarily forced the glacial floods 
to pass through at a rate so reduced as to compel an accumu- 
lation forming an extensive temporary lake of a depth sufficient 
to have covered any existing hights of the present bluffs. 
Since these observed facts can be verified without difficulty 
they give to the aqueous theory a support that renders imma- 
terial the contested supposition of whether or not the region 
