Drumlins.  Drumlins are smooth, rounded hills composed of till, elliptical in base, and having their longer axes parallel to the movement of the ice as shown by glacial scorings.  They crowd certain districts in central New York and in southern Wisconsin, where they may be counted by the thousands.  Among the numerous drumlins about Boston is historic Bunker Hill.

Drumlins are made of ground moraine.  They were accumulated and given shape beneath the overriding ice, much as are sand bars in a river, or in some instances were carved, like roches moutonnees, by an ice sheet out of the till left by an earlier ice invasion.

Terminal moraines.  The glaciated area is crossed by belts of thickened drift, often a mile or two, and sometimes even ten miles and more, in breadth, which lie transverse to the movement of the ice and clearly are the terminal moraines of ancient ice sheets, marking either the limit of their farthest advance or pauses in their general retreat.

The surface of these moraines is a jumble of elevations and depressions, which vary from low, gentle swells and shallow sags to sharp hills, a hundred feet or so in height, and deep, steep-sided hollows.  Such tumultuous hills and hummocks, set with depressions of all shapes, which usually are without outlet and are often occupied by marshes, ponds, and lakes, surely cannot be the work of running water.  The hills are heaps of drift, lodged beneath the ice edge or piled along its front.  The basins were left among the tangle of morainic knolls and ridges as the margin of the ice moved back and forth.  Some bowl-shaped basins were made by the melting of a mass of ice left behind by the retreating glacier and buried in its debris.

The stratified drift.  Like modern glaciers the ice sheets of the Pleistocene were ever being converted into water about their margins.  Their limits on the land were the lines where their onward flow was just balanced by melting and evaporation.  On the surface of the ice along the marginal zone, rivulets no doubt flowed in summer, and found their way through crevasses to the interior of the glacier or to the ground.  Subglacial streams, like those of the Malaspina glacier, issued from tunnels in the ice, and water ran along the melting ice front as it is seen to do about the glacier tongues of Greenland.  All these glacier waters flowed away down the chief drainage channels in swollen rivers loaded with glacial waste.

It is not unexpected therefore that there are found, over all the country where the melting ice retreated, deposits made of the same materials as the till, but sorted and stratified by running water.  Some of these were deposited behind the ice front in ice-walled channels, some at the edge of the glaciers by issuing streams, and others were spread to long distances in front of the ice edge by glacial waters as they flowed away.