ESKERS are narrow, winding ridges of stratified sand and gravel whose general course lies parallel with the movement of the glacier.  These ridges, though evidently laid by running water, do not follow lines of continuous descent, but may be found to cross river valleys and ascend their sides.  Hence the streams by which eskers were laid did not flow unconfined upon the surface of the ground.  We may infer that eskers were deposited in the tunnels and ice-walled gorges of glacial streams before they issued from the ice front.

KAMES are sand and gravel knolls, associated for the most part with terminal moraines, and heaped by glacial waters along the margin of the ice.

Kame terraces are hummocky embankments of stratified drift sometimes found in rugged regions along the sides of valleys.  In these valleys long tongues of glacier ice lay slowly melting.  Glacial waters took their way between the edges of the glaciers and the hillside, and here deposited sand and gravel in rude terraces.

Outwash plains are plains of sand and gravel which frequently border terminal moraines on their outward face, and were spread evidently by outwash from the melting ice.  Outwash plains are sometimes pitted by bowl-shaped basins where ice blocks were left buried in the sand by the retreating glacier.

Valley trains are deposits of stratified drift with which river valleys have been aggraded.  Valleys leading outward from the ice front were flooded by glacial waters and were filled often to great depths with trains of stream-swept drift.  Since the disappearance of the ice these glacial flood plains have been dissected by the shrunken rivers of recent times and left on either side the valley in high terraces.  Valley trains head in morainic plains, and their material grows finer down valley and coarser toward their sources.  Their gradient is commonly greater than that of the present rivers.

The extent of the drift.  The extent of the drift of North America and its southern limits are best seen in Figure 359.  Its area is reckoned at about four million square miles.  The ice fields which once covered so much of our continent were all together ten times as large as the inland ice of Greenland, and about equal to the enormous ice cap which now covers the antartic regions.

The ice field of Europe was much smaller, measuring about seven hundred and seventy thousand square miles.

Centers of dispersion.  The direction of the movement of the ice is recorded plainly in the scorings of the rock surface, in the shapes of glaciated hills, in the axes of drumlins and eskers, and in trains of bowlders, when the ledges from which they were plucked can be discovered.  In these ways it has been proved that in North America there were three centers where ice gathered to the greatest depth, and from which it flowed in all directions