On the north side of Lake Ontario, southwest of the Canadian city of
Kingston, is a lake situated on a height of land one side of which
forms a cliff. It is just south of the arm of Lake Ontario known
as Quinte Bay and it stands 180 feet above the bay. There is no
opportunity for surface waters to flow into this little lake and no one
has the slightest idea whence it derives its waters, which are clear
and fresh. The lake is about one and a half miles long with a width of
about three-quarters of a mile.
Mr. A. T. Drummond recently wrote a letter to _Nature_, in which he
said he believed he had solved the mystery of the invisible inflow,
which cannot possibly be attributed to springs from any higher ground
in the neighborhood. In his opinion the source of the lake is to be
found in the Trenton limestone area some twenty-five or thirty miles to
the northeast. There is a steady rise in these rocks to the north and
their dip is favorable to sending the water that sinks through the soil
to them southward to the region of Lake Ontario. Fifty miles away the
rocks have a height of 400 feet above the lake.
In order to ascertain the bearing of these rocks upon the origin of
the inflow, Mr. Drummond last summer made a series of soundings in
the little lake. The largest part of the lake is shallow, but along
its southern edge he found a great rent in the bottom nearly a mile
long and a third of a mile wide. In this rent the depths varied from
seventy-five to 100 feet. He says the rent is probably due to a wide
fault or breakage in the Trenton limestone, and he believes that the
same forces that gave rise to this fault may account for a subterranean
connection with the higher ground many miles to the north through which
the water finds its way into the little lake that overlooks Ontario.
Mr. Drummond’s theory is the most plausible that has yet been suggested
to account for the source from which this mysterious lake receives its
waters.