LAKES. Lakes are perhaps the most obvious of these fleeting features of infancy. They are short-lived, for their destruction is soon accomplished by several means. As a river system advances toward maturity the deepening and extending valleys of the tributaries lower the ground-water surface and invade the undrained depressions of the region. Lakes having outlets are drained away as their basin rims are cut down by the outflowing streams,--a slow process where the rim is of hard rock, but a rapid one where it is of soft material such as glacial drift. Lakes are effaced also by the filling of their basins. Inflowing streams and the wash of rains bring in waste. Waves abrade the shore and strew the debris worn from it over the lake bed. Shallow lakes are often filled with organic matter from decaying vegetation. Does the outflowing stream, from a lake carry sediment? How does this fact affect its erosive power on hard rock? on loose material? Lake Geneva is a well-known example of a lake in process of obliteration. The inflowing Rhone has already displaced the waters of the lake for a length of twenty miles with the waste brought down from the high Alps. For this distance there extends up the Rhone Valley an alluvial plain, which has grown lakeward at the rate of a mile and a half since Roman times, as proved by the distance inland at which a Roman port now stands. How rapidly a lake may be silted up under exceptionally favorable conditions is illustrated by the fact that over the bottom of the artificial lake, of thirty-five square miles, formed behind the great dam across the Colorado River at Austin, Texas, sediments thirty-nine feet deep gathered in seven years. Lake Mendota, one of the many beautiful lakes of southern Wisconsin, is rapidly cutting back the soft glacial drift of its shores by means of the abrasion of its waves. While the shallow basin is thus broadened, it is also being filled with the waste; and the time is brought nearer when it will be so shoaled that vegetation can complete the work of its effacement. Along the margin of a shallow lake mosses, water lilies, grasses, and other water-loving plants grow luxuriantly. As their decaying remains accumulate on the bottom, the ring of marsh broadens inwards, the lake narrows gradually to a small pond set in the midst of a wide bog, and finally disappears. All stages in this process of extinction may be seen among the countless lakelets which occupy sags in the recent sheets of glacial drift in the northern states; and more numerous than the lakes which still remain are those already thus filled with carbonaceous matter derived from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. Such fossil lakes are marked by swamps or level meadows underlain with muck.