HAT was going on in the Great Lake region some sixty thousand years ago has had very much to do with what is going on there today. The fact that there was at some such distance of time, and in that particular locality, a great upsetting of nature, by which the map of middle America was quite remodelled, explains why there are powerhouses and town sites in certain situations at the present time. Out of chaos have come factories, and from a mighty tumbling about of things prehistoric have come rich fruit lands and money-making farms.

In other words, the industrial works that are going on today in certain districts of the lake country owe their existence directly to some very peculiar worldmovements many milleniums ago. That is undoubtedly true of many other districts the world over; just what was doing before the curtain lifted no one knows, and nature may have been universally and chronically upset; but in one especial place she has left marks so plain and so fascinatingly readable that the story of her ancient doings can be put together like a second book of Genesis. That place is the shore country of Lake Ontario, and its story proves what modern industrialism owes to the hoary past.

At Niagara Falls power-works on both the American and Canadian sides have now in course of development a total of 615,000 horse power, of which 160,000 is already in operation. Five companies are concerned in this development, each with a somewhat different method of engineering. One, for instance, will divert the water from the Niagara river above the falls, carry it a mile through an eighteen-foot underground conduit, and then pour it down upon the turbines at the foot of the Canadian falls, where the power-house is built. Two Two other companies have, in order to give a fall to the water, dug wheel-pits, which empty, one by means of a tunnel directly under the Horseshoe Falls, and the other by a tailrace. The engineering basis of all, however, is the difference in level between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, a matter of three hundred and twentyseven feet, which gives at the falls, where the water suddenly drops over a steep precipice of rock, a head of about one hundred and fifty feet. Because there is this difference of level, and because

nature has made this precipice, the power-works of today are possible.

Two other power schemes on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario are dependent upon very much the same conditions. Power for commercial purposes is now being delivered in the city af Hamilton from Decew Falls, where, with a head of two hundred and sixty-five feet, 50,000 horse power has been secured by drawing Lake Erie water from the Welland canal and storing it in a thousandacre reservoir. At St. Catharines, a near-by town, a fall of two hundred and ten feet offers itself as a possible power

site, and a project is now on foot to tap the Welland river by an eightmile canal large enough to develop 100,000 horse power.

There is a reason why these enterprises are so close to Lake Ontario; but to find it, one must take evidence some sixty thousand years old. Electric railways, civic lighting systems, and manufacturing plants owe their existence in their present form to the thoroughgoing way in which some prehistoric glaciers changed the face of the country

quois. It was at first lower than the lake of today, and the melting of the ice dam, by providing a new outlet into the St. Lawrence, rapidly brought its level still further down. But at the head of the lake it rose again during later ages till it reached a point one hundred and fifty feet higher than the present lake and some seven miles wider. Lake Iroquois lasted for perhaps 17,000 years, and then its water drained off to the level of the modern Lake Ontario. From then until now has been probably an equal length of time,-ages to us, but in geological chronology a mere moment.