"I am not prepared to write as I would like concerning the forest-beds and old soils. I will, however, offer the following as a partial report. I have come to think that there is considerable confusion on the subject. I believe there are five or six different things classed under one head. "1. _Recent Much and Soils._--The finest example I have found in the whole Missouri Valley was twenty feet below silt and clay, in a basin inside the outer moraine, near Grand View, South Dakota. From my examination of the reported old soil near Albia, Iowa, I think the most rational way of reconciling the conflicting statements concerning it is that it also belongs to this class. "2. _Peat or Soil under Loess._--This does not signify much if the loess was formed in a lake subject to orographic oscillations, or if, as I am coming to believe, it is a fluviatile deposit of an oscillating river like the Hoang-Ho on the great Chinese plain. It at least does not mean an interglacial epoch. "3. _Wood and Dirt rearranged, not in situ._--This occurs either in subaqueous or in subglacial deposits. I have found drift-wood in the lower layers of the loess here, but not _in situ_. I have frequently found traces of wood in till in Dakota, but always in an isolated way. I think, from reading statements about the deposits in eastern Iowa, that most if not all of the cases are of this sort. Two things have conspired to lead to this error: one, the influence of Croll's speculation; and the other, the easy inference of many well-diggers, and especially well-borers, that what they pass through are always in layers. In this way a log becomes a forest-bed. Scattered logs and muck fragments occurring frequently in a region, though at different levels, are readily imagined by an amateur geologist to be one continuous stratum antedating the glacier or floods (as the case may be in that particular region), when, in fact, it has been washed down from the margin of the transporting agent and is contemporaneous with it. I suspect the prevalence of wood in eastern Iowa may be traced to a depression of the driftless region during the advance of the glacier, so as to bring the western side of that area more into the grasp of glacial agencies. "4. _Peat between Subglacial Tills._--If cases of this sort are found, they are in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Professor Worthen insisted that there were no interglacial soils or forest-beds in Illinois; and in the cases mentioned in the State reports he repeatedly explains the sections given by his assistants, so as to harmonize them with that statement. I think he usually makes his explanations plausible. He was very confident in referring most of them, to preglacial times. His views, I suppose, will be published in the long-delayed volume, now about to be issued.