Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/209

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PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE ADIRONDACKS.
205

Lake George directly into Lake Champlain. Some of these are largely, if not essentially, preglacial in their courses, occupying the earlier valleys mentioned above. Others have been obviously influenced in their present locations by the glacial deposits. It is clear from the insuperable rocky obstacles presented that drainage must even in the preglacial period have radiated from the central height of land, and that there is a marked preglacial divide around Mt. Marcy which at this time separated the waters going north from those going south. But there are some strange features about the present courses of the Hudson and Sacondaga and some interesting points about Lake George which will be briefly noted.

Fig. 10. A Fault in Paleozoic Strata near Essex, N. Y., on Lake Champlain. The Utica slates, from flatness on the left beyond the picture, are dragged to a fairly steep inclination, where faulted against the hard Beekmantown limestone, which lies several hundred feet below in the stratigraphic series.

The Hudson gathers its waters first from a series of beautiful mountain lakes almost under Mts. Marcy and McIntyre, the loftiest two peaks, and flows nearly due north for fifteen miles, following, no doubt, one of the older north and south valleys. It then turns abruptly westward, winding for five miles amid hillocks of drift, and tapping a notable series of east and west lakes near Newcomb village, doubtless impounded in one of the old east and west valleys. It then turns nearly due south for ten miles and makes an abrupt bend, of somewhat less than ninety degrees, to the eastward, being apparently diverted into an east and west valley by a barrier of drift. Just after it makes the turn it receives the waters of Indian River coming from a drift-covered,