PIKE COUNTY. *: 635 
It is certain that the great ice-sheet never brought its burdens of foreign 
materials to these areas. There are in Pike county no deposits of bank 
gravel—the great resource of the districts north for road-making—if a 
single exception is made for the neighborhood of Cynthiana. The river 
beds and banks furnish an abundant supply of gravel to the regions adja- 
cent; but the absence of bank gravel shows that we have passed beyond 
the most characteristic effects of the Drift. 
_ The Scioto yalley—like all similar valleys in this portion of the State— 
is filled with deposits of modified Drift throughout its whole extent. 
This valley Drift in Pike county is recognized under four divisions, viz., 
the first, second, third, and fourth bottoms. The first bottoms, the lowest 
of the series, comprise the lands that are overflowed at every flood; the 
second bottoms are covered only with extreme high water. The bound- 
ary of the third bottoms is quite distinctly shown in a terrace fifteen or 
twenty feet in height, and its surface is elevated by the same measure 
above the highest floods. The fourth and last division has an elevation 
of about sixty feet above low water, and is generally bounded by a dis- 
tinct terrace. It is not to be understood that all of these divisions are to 
be recognized every where. Sometimes the first bottoms extend to the 
edge of the bedded rocks which bound the valley ; and more frequently 
the four divisions are all represented in a bank fifty or sixty feet above 
the river channel. Between Jasper and Piketon the whole series is very 
handsomely shown. 
- The third and fourth divisions agree in general composition. They 
both consist of gravel—a large part of which is limestone—of sand, léssn, 
and clay, variously intermingled. The broad, fertile, and well-drained 
tracts of the fourth bottoms furnish very attractive and advantageous 
locations for residence, and have been selected for the two principal 
towns of the valley, viz., Waverly and Piketon. 
The first and second bottoms furnish the most productive lands of the 
county. .There is, in fact, no better corn land in the State than this di- 
vision within ds limits of Pike county. Their fertility is maintained 
unimpaired by annual deposits from back-water—the overflow of the 
river being now quite commonly regulated by levees. The depth of the 
annual deposit upon the lowest bottoms varies from*%)ne inch to one foot. 
When the larger measure is reached, a winter must intervene before the 
mud works kindly under tillage. 
As the drainage of the State was sradually arrested in the later stages 
of the Drift period by the northward subsidence of the continent, it 
seems probable that the valley was largely filled to the height of the last 
terrace. When a re-elevation began, the clearing out of the old channel 
