REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR, 1922 13 
array of such factors, to which the illimitable ages and changes of 
their history have subjected them. Such problems can not be endur- 
ingly solved without the consent of these contributing factors.’ 
The proposal to create a deep ship channel in the rejuvenated and 
rocky beds of the Hudson river between Albany and Poughkeepsie, 
has excited the imagination of riparian communities which have 
dreamed gilded visions of stately seagoing craft bringing to their 
doors the wealth of other lands. Mayors, common councils, cham- 
bers of commerce, boards of trade and less formal citizens’ organi- 
zations have joined in enthusiastic coalition with countrywide deep 
waterway organizations in pressing their hopes to a fruition, but at 
no time, amid these forecastings, have the historical and geological 
controls of the river been made a matter of serious consideration. 
The river flows today as it did 10 years ago and 10,000 years ago. 
Governor Miller, protesting most effectively the proposal to con- 
struct a ship channel through the St Lawrence river, meeting with 
convincing argument every claim set forward by the promulgators 
of the project, industrial, financial, civic, national and fraternal, 
quite failed to take account of the geological control of that vast and 
venerable artery of the continent. Such procedures emphasize the 
importance, as a matter of intellectual economy and brain salvage, of 
determining first of all whether such extensive projects are possible 
of solution where a maintenance is involved which is in itself hostile 
to the established habitudes of these rivers. 
Buried forest at Lyons. In the month of August 1922 a heavy 
downpour caused a flood in the waters of Canandaigua outlet and 
where this stream enters the village of Lyons the waters left their 
channel and cut across the flats from Forgham street north into the 
Barge canal, discharging so much silt into the canal as to seriously 
interfere with traffic. The new channel was about 200 yards long, 
excavated to a minimum depth of 12 feet and in places it was as 
much as 50 feet wide. This washout exposed, at a depth from the 
surface of from 3 to 6 feet, a buried forest. The surface here is a 
level plain, 400 feet above tide. It stands in correct correlation with 
the level of the bottom of Lake Iroquois which here formed a 
western projecting arm of the main body of water extending from 
the Rome district west to central Wayne county, thence trending 
northwest and west along the beach known as the Ridge road. Most 
of the trees were found beneath 6 feet of clay evidently deposited 
1See Clarke, “A propos de la canalization du St Laurent.” Bul. de la 
Soc. de Géogr. de Quebec. p. 154. 10922. 
