Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/301

 northern part of Franklin county, that any water is still drawn from the back of Blue mountain. Again, these small stream gaps do not lie between large river-gaps and wind-gaps, but wind-gaps lie between the gaps of large rivers and those of small streams that are not yet diverted. Excellent illustration of this is found on the "Piedmont sheet" of the contoured maps issued by the United States Geological Survey. The sheet covers part of Maryland and West Virginia, near where the North Branch of the Potomac comes out of the plateau and crosses New Creek mountain. Eleven miles south of the Potomac gap there is a deep wind-gap; but further on, at twenty, twenty-five and twenty-nine miles from the river-gap are three fine water-gaps occupied by small streams. This example merely shows how many important points in the history of our rivers will be made clear when the country is properly portrayed on contoured maps.

A few lines may be given to the general absence of gaps in Blue Mountain in Pennsylvania. When the initial consequent drainage was established, many streams must have been located on the northward slope of the great Cumberland highland, C, C, fig. 21; they must have gullied the slope to great depths and carried away great volumes of the weak Cambrian beds that lay deep within the hard outer casings of the mass. Minor adjustments served to diminish the number of these streams, but the more effective cause of their present rarity lay in the natural selection of certain of them to become large streams; the smaller ones were generally beheaded by these. The only examples of streams that still cross this ridge with their initial Permian direction of flow to the northwest are found in two southern branches of Tuscarora creek at the southern point of Juniata county; and these survive because of their obscure location among the many Medina ridges of that district, where they were not easily accessible to capture by other streams.

38. Tertiary adjustment of the Juniata on the Medina anticlines.—The lower course of the Juniata presents several examples of adjustment referable to the last part of the Jura-Cretaceous cycle and to the Tertiary cycle. The explanation offered for the escape of this river from its initial syncline did not show any reason for its peculiar position with respect to the several Medina anticlines that it now borders, because at the time when it was led across country to the Wiconisco syncline, the hard Medina beds of these anticlines were not discovered. It is therefore