Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/262

248 channels. But neither in the lakes which have been surveyed by the Swiss Government, nor in the Atlas des Lacs Françaises of M. Delebecque, nor in those of the German Alps by Dr. Alois Geistbeck, nor in the lakes of our own country, can I find any indications of such submerged river channels or ravines, or any other of the varied rock features that so often occur in valleys. Almost all these lakes present rather steeply sloping sides with broad, rounded, or nearly level bottoms of saucer shape, such as are certainly not characteristic of subaërial valley bottoms, but which are exactly what we might expect as the ultimate result of thousands of years of incessant ice grinding. The point is, not that the lake bottoms may not in a few cases represent the contours of a valley, but that they never present peculiarities of contour which are not unfrequent in mountain valleys, and never show submerged ravines or those jutting rocky promontories which are so common a feature in hilly districts.

The next point is, that Alpine lake bottoms, whether large or small, frequently consist of two or more distinct basins, a feature which could not occur in lakes due to submergence unless there were two or more points of flexure for each depression, a thing highly improbable even in the larger lakes and almost impossible in the smaller. Flexures of almost any degree of curvature are no doubt found in the rocks forming mountain chains; but these flexures have been produced deep down under enormous pressure of overlying strata, whereas the surface beds which are supposed to have been moved to cause lakes are free to take any upward or downward curves, and, as the source of motion is certainly deep-seated, those curves will usually be of very gradual curvature. Yet in the small lake of Annecy there are two separate basins; in Lake Bourget also two; in the small lake of Aiguebellette, in Savoy, there are three distinct basins of very different depths; and in the Lac de St. Point, about four miles long, there are also three separate flat basins. In Switzerland the same phenomenon is often found. In the Lake of Neufchâtel there are three basins separated by ridges from twenty to thirty feet above the deeper parts. The small Lac de Joux, at the head of a high valley in the Jura, has also three shallow basins. Lake Zurich consists of three well-marked basins. The exceedingly irregular Lake of Lucerne, formed by the confluence of many valleys meeting at various angles hemmed in by precipitous mountains, has eight distinct basins, mostly separated by shallows at the narrow openings between opposing mountain ridges. This is exactly what would result from glacier action, the grinding power of which must always be at a maximum in the wider parts of valleys, where the weight of the ice could exert its full force and the motion be least impeded. On the subsidence or curvature