174 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 
It is very difficult to select a set of delta plains or terrace levels 
from Kingston to Troy which can be referred to an open body of 
water; Woodworth says:'° “It has proved well nigh impossible to 
find any systematic relation of the various water levels which are 
indicated in this portion of the valley, after making due allowance 
for such deposits as appear . . . to have been built in waters 
confined along the ice margin or held up on the rock terraces of the 
Hudson gorge by ice remaining in it.” This much is evident; all of 
the clays in the valley north of Rondout do not belong to a single 
waterbody which may be called Lake Albany; some of them were 
laid down in ponded water marginal to the ice tongue filling the 
main valley and parts of the smaller valleys tributary to it. For 
example there is a fragment of a sand delta one mile northwest of 
Catskill village (Catskill quadrangle) crossed by a section of the 
Old King’s road, which is but little more than 180 feet above tide; 
the clays at Leeds, south of the creek, attain an elevation of 190 feet 
and are more than two miles upstream. ‘There is much to suggest 
that Lake Albany was cumbered with ice, both floating and anchored 
in the gorge, that cobble-covered ice formed the bed of its outlet for 
many miles and that this protected ice in the lower valley existed con- 
temporaneously with the buried masses in the upper valley already 
mentioned, as long as this “lake” endured. 
The eastern side of the Hudson valley calls for little description. 
Woodworth’s “ Newburgh stage’ deposits were built against stag- 
nant ice or on its thin edge overlying the rock terraces and repre- 
sent only the last terms of a series which begins high up among the 
hills of the eastern watershed near the Connecticut and Massachu- 
setts boundaries. The accumulations marking the earlier and higher 
levels in this region have been described in part by F. B. Taylor 
(Journal of Geology vol. xi, 1903, pp 323-3604.) who attempted their 
correlation and the reconstruction of the ice. borders along which 
they were laid down. If the general method used in the reconstruc- 
tion of these fragments of the recessional positions of the “ ice- 
front’’ is at all reliable, the great irregularity of the frontal line, 
the thinness of the ice occupying the valleys, the evidence of much 
persistent ice to the south of any assumed front and the absence of 
tracable lines of drainage beyond that front (erosion and sedimenta- 
tion) tending to obliterate the deposits of the preceding positions, 
furnish that combination of circumstances which the writer has used 
* Ancient Water Levels, etc. p. Iot. 
