| GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DRIFT | Frontispiece. |
| TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY | 5 |
| SCRATCHED STONE, FROM THE TILL | 6 |
| RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER | 19 |
| TERMINAL MORAINE | 20 |
| GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY POINT, LAKE ERIE | 26 |
| DRIFT-DEPOSITS IN THE TROPICS | 38 |
| STRATIFIED BEDS IN TILL, LEITHEN WATER, PEEBLESSHIRE, SCOTLAND | 54 |
| SECTION AT JOINVILLE | 54 |
| ORBITS OF THE PERIODIC COMETS | 83 |
| ORBIT OF EARTH AND COMET | 88 |
| THE EARTH'S ORBIT | 89 |
| THE COMET SWEEPING PAST THE EARTH | 92 |
| THE SIDE OF THE EARTH STRUCK BY THE COMET | 93 |
| THE SIDE NOT STRUCK BY THE COMET | 93 |
| THE GREAT COMET OF 1811 | 95 |
| CRAG AND TAIL | 98 |
| SOLAR SPECTRUM | 105 |
| SECTION AT ST. ACHEUL | 122 |
| THE ENGIS SKULL | 124 |
| THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL | 125 |
| PLUMMET FROM SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA | 180 |
| {p. v} | |
| COMET OF 1862 | 137 |
| COURSE OF DONATI'S COMET | 157 |
| THE PRIMEVAL STORM | 220 |
| THE AFRITE IN THE PILLAR | 270 |
| DAHISH OVERTAKEN BY DIMIRIAT | 272 |
| EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, BELGIUM | 347 |
| PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH | 349 |
| PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF REINDEER | 350 |
| PRE-GLACIAL MAN'S PICTURE OF THE HORSE | 351 |
| SPECIMEN OF PRE-GLACIAL CARVING | 352 |
| STONE IMAGE FOUND IN OHIO | 353 |
| COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {front} | 356 |
| COPPER COIN, FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN FEET UNDER GROUND, IN ILLINOIS {back} | 356 |
| BIELA'S COMET, SPLIT IN TWO | 409 |
| SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL | 432 |
{p. 1}
READER,--Let us reason together:--
What do we dwell on? The earth. What part of the earth? The latest formations, of course. We live upon the top of a mighty series of stratified rocks, laid down in the water of ancient seas and lakes, during incalculable ages, said, by geologists, to be from ten to twenty miles in thickness.
Think of that! Rock piled over rock, from the primeval granite upward, to a height four times greater than our highest mountains, and every rock stratified like the leaves of a book; and every leaf containing the records of an intensely interesting history, illustrated with engravings, in the shape of fossils, of all forms of life, from the primordial cell up to the bones of man and his implements.
But it is not with the pages of this sublime volume
{p. 2}
we have to deal in this book. It is with a vastly different but equally wonderful formation.
Upon the top of the last of this series of stratified rocks we find THE DRIFT.
What is it?
Go out with me where yonder men are digging a well. Let us observe the material they are casting out.
First they penetrate through a few inches or a foot or two of surface soil; then they enter a vast deposit of sand, gravel, and clay. It may be fifty, one hundred, five hundred, eight hundred feet, before they reach the stratified rocks on which this drift rests. It covers whole continents. It is our earth. It makes the basis of our soils; our railroads cut their way through it; our carriages drive over it; our cities are built upon it; our crops are derived from it; the water we drink percolates through it; on it we live, love, marry, raise children, think, dream, and die; and in the bosom of it we will be buried.
Where did it come from?
That is what I propose to discuss with you in this work,--if you will have the patience to follow me.
So far as possible, [as I shall in all cases speak by the voices of others] I shall summon my witnesses that you may cross-examine them. I shall try, to the best of my ability, to buttress every opinion with adequate proofs. If I do not convince, I hope at least to interest you.
And to begin: let us understand what the Drift is, before we proceed to discuss its origin.
In the first place, it is mainly unstratified; its lower formation is altogether so. There may be clearly defined strata here and there in it, but they are such as a tempest might make, working in a dust-heap: picking up a patch here and laying it upon another there. But there
{p. 3}
are no continuous layers reaching over any large extent of country.
Sometimes the material has been subsequently worked over by rivers, and been distributed over limited areas in strata, as in and around the beds of streams.
But in the lower, older, and first-laid-down portion of the Drift, called in Scotland "the till," and in other countries "the hard-pan," there is a total absence of stratification.
James Geikie says:
"In describing the till, I remarked that the irregular manner in which the stones were scattered through that deposit imparted to it a confused and tumultuous appearance. The clay does not arrange itself in layers or beds, but is distinctly unstratified."[1]
"The material consisted of earth, gravel, and stones, and also in some places broken trunks or branches of trees. Part of it was deposited in a pell-mell or unstratified condition during the progress of the period, and part either stratified or unstratified in the opening part of the next period when the ice melted."[2]
"The unstratified drift may be described as a heterogeneous mass of clay, with sand and gravel in varying proportions, inclosing the transported fragments of rock, of all dimensions, partially rounded or worn into wedge-shaped forms, and generally with surfaces furrowed or scratched, the whole material looking as if it had been scraped together."[3]
The "till" of Scotland is "spread in broad but somewhat ragged sheets" through the Lowlands, "continuous across wide tracts," while in the Highland and upland districts it is confined principally to the valleys.[4]
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 21.
2. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220.
3. "American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 111.
4. "Great Ice Age," Geikie, p. 6.]
{p. 4}
"The lowest member is invariably a tough, stony clay, called 'till' or 'hard-pan.' Throughout wide districts stony clay alone occurs."[1]
"It is hard to say whether the till consists more of stones or of clay."[2]
This "till," this first deposit, will be found to be the strangest and most interesting.
In the second place, although the Drift is found on the earth, it is unfossiliferous. That is to say, it contains no traces of pre-existent or contemporaneous life.
This, when we consider it, is an extraordinary fact:
Where on the face of this life-marked earth could such a mass of material be gathered up, and not contain any evidences of life? It is as if one were to say that he had collected the detritus of a great city, and that it showed no marks of man's life or works.
"I would reiterate," says Geikie,[3] "that nearly all the Scotch shell-bearing beds belong to the very close of the glacial period; only in one or two places have shells ever been obtained, with certainty, from a bed in the true till of Scotland. They occur here and there in bowlder-clay, and underneath bowlder-clay, in maritime districts; but this clay, as I have shown, is more recent than the till--fact, rests upon its eroded surface."
"The lower bed of the drift is entirely destitute of organic remains."[4]
Sir Charles Lyell tells us that even the stratified drift is usually devoid of fossils:
"Whatever may be the cause, the fact is certain that over large areas in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, I might add throughout the northern hemisphere, on both sides of the Atlantic, the stratified drift of the glacial period is very commonly devoid of fossils."[5]
[1. "Great Ice Age," Geikie, p. 7.
2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 342.
4. Rev. O. Fisher, quoted in "The World before the Deluge," p. 461.
5. "Antiquity of Man," third edition, p. 268.]
{p. 5}
In the next place, this "till" differs from the rest of the Drift in its exceeding hardness:
"This till is so tough that engineers would much rather excavate the most obdurate rocks than attempt to remove it from their path. Hard rocks are more or less easily assailable with gunpowder, and the numerous joints and fissures by which they are traversed enable the workmen to wedge them out often in considerable lumps. But till has neither crack nor joint; it will not blast, and to pick it to pieces is a very slow and laborious process. Should streaks of sand penetrate it, water will readily soak through, and large masses will then run or collapse, as soon as an opening is made into it."
###
TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY, RIVER STINCHAR.
r, Rock; t, Till; g, Bowlder-Clay; x, Fine Gravel, etc.
The accompanying cut shows the manner in which it is distributed, and its relations to the other deposits of the Drift.
In this "till" or "hard-pan" are found some strange and characteristic stones. They are bowlders, not water-worn, not rounded, as by the action of waves, and yet not angular--for every point and projection has been ground off. They are not very large, and they differ in this and other respects from the bowlders found in the other portions of the Drift. These stones in the "till" are always striated--that is, cut by deep lines or grooves, usually running lengthwise, or parallel to their longest diameter. The cut on the following page represents one of them.
{p. 6}
Above this clay is a deposit resembling it, and yet differing from it, called the "bowlder-clay." This is not so tough or hard. The bowlders in it are larger and more angular-sometimes they are of immense size; one at
###
SCRATCHED STONE (BLACK SHALE), FROM THE TILL.
Bradford, Massachusetts, is estimated to weigh 4,500,000 pounds. Many on Cape Cod are twenty feet in diameter. One at Whitingham, Vermont, is forty-three feet long by thirty feet high, or 40,000 cubic feet in bulk. In some
{p. 7}
cases no rocks of the same material are found within two hundred miles.[1]
These two formations--the "till" and the "bowlder-clay"--sometimes pass into each other by insensible degrees. At other times the distinction is marked. Some of the stones in the bowlder-clay are furrowed or striated, but a large part of them are not; while in the "till" the stone not striated is the rare exception.
Above this bowlder-clay we find sometimes beds of loose gravel, sand, and stones, mixed with the remains of man and other animals. These have all the appearance of being later in their deposition, and of having been worked over by the action of water and ice.
This, then, is, briefly stated, the condition of the Drift.
It is plain that it was the result of violent action of some kind.
And this action must have taken place upon an unparalleled and continental scale. One writer describes it as,
"A remarkable and stupendous period--a period so startling that it might justly be accepted with hesitation, were not the conception unavoidable before a series of facts as extraordinary as itself."[2]
Remember, then, in the discussions which follow, that if the theories advanced are gigantic, the facts they seek to explain are not less so. We are not dealing with little things. The phenomena are continental, world-wide, globe-embracing.
[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 221.
2. Gratacap, "Ice Age," "Popular Science Monthly," January, 1878.]
WHILE several different origins have been assigned for the phenomena known as "the Drift," and while one or two of these have been widely accepted and taught in our schools as established truths, yet it is not too much to say that no one of them meets all the requirements of the case, or is assented to by the profoundest thinkers of our day.
Says one authority:
"The origin of the unstratified drift is a question which has been much controverted."[1]
Louis Figuier says,[2] after considering one of the proposed theories:
"No such hypothesis is sufficient to explain either the cataclysms or the glacial phenomena; and we need not hesitate to confess our ignorance of this strange, this mysterious episode in the history of our globe. … Nevertheless, we repeat, no explanation presents itself which can be considered conclusive; and in science we should never be afraid to say, I do not know."
Geikie says:
"Many geologists can not yet be persuaded that till has ever formed and accumulated under ice." [3]
A recent scientific writer, after summing up all the facts and all the arguments, makes this confession:
[1. "American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 112.
2. "The World before the Deluge," pp. 435, 463.
3. "The Great Ice Age," p. 370.]
{p. 9}
From the foregoing facts, it seems to me that we are justified in concluding:
"1. That however simple and plausible the Lyellian hypothesis may be, or however ingenious the extension or application of it suggested by Dana, it is not sustained by any proof, and the testimony of the rocks seems to be decidedly against it.
"2. Though much may yet be learned from a more extended and careful study of the glacial phenomena of all parts of both hemispheres, the facts already gathered seem to be incompatible with any theory yet advanced which makes the Ice period simply a series of telluric phenomena, and so far strengthens the arguments of those who look to extraneous and cosmical causes for the origin of these phenomena."[1]
The reader will therefore understand that, in advancing into this argument, he is not invading a realm where Science has already set up her walls and bounds and landmarks; but rather he is entering a forum in which a great debate still goes on, amid the clamor of many tongues.
There are four theories by which it has been attempted to explain the Drift.
These are:
I. The action of great waves and floods of water.
II. The action of icebergs.
III. The action of glaciers.
IV. The action of a continental ice-sheet.
We will consider these several theories in their order.
[1. "Popular Science Monthly," July, 1876, p. 290.]
{p. 10}
WHEN men began, for the first time, to study the drift deposits, they believed that they found in them the results of the Noachic Deluge; and hence the Drift was called the Diluvium, and the period of time in which it was laid down was entitled the Diluvial age.
It was supposed that--
"Somehow and somewhere in the far north a series of gigantic waves was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly over mountain and valley alike, carrying along with them a mighty burden of rocks and stones and rubbish. Such deluges were called 'waves of translation.'"[1]
There were many difficulties about this theory:
In the first place, there was no cause assigned for these waves, which must have been great enough to have swept over the tops of high mountains, for the evidences of the Drift age are found three thousand feet above the Baltic, four thousand feet high in the Grampians of Scotland, and six thousand feet high in New England.
In the next place, if this deposit had been swept up from or by the sea, it would contain marks of its origin. The shells of the sea, the bones of fish, the remains of seals and whales, would have been taken up by these great deluges, and carried over the land, and have remained
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 26.]
{p. 11}
mingled in the débris which they deposited. This is not the case. The unstratified Drift is unfossiliferous, and where the stratified Drift contains fossils they are the remains of land animals, except in a few low-lying districts near the sea.
I quote:
"Over the interior of the continent it contains no marine fossils or relics."[1]
Geikie says:
"Not a single trace of any marine organism has yet been detected in true till."[2]
Moreover, if the sea-waves made these great deposits, they must have picked up the material composing them either from the shores of the sea or the beds of streams. And when we consider the vastness of the drift-deposits, extending, as they do, over continents, with a depth of hundreds of feet, it would puzzle us to say where were the sea-beaches or rivers on the globe that could produce such inconceivable quantities of gravel, sand, and clay. The production of gravel is limited to a small marge of the ocean, not usually more than a mile wide, where the waves and the rocks meet. If we suppose the whole shore of the oceans around the northern half of America to be piled up with gravel five hundred feet thick, it would go but a little way to form the immense deposits which stretch from the Arctic Sea to Patagonia.
The stones of the "till" are strangely marked, striated, and scratched, with lines parallel to the longest diameter. No such stones are found in river-beds or on sea-shores.
Geikie says:
"We look in vain for striated stones in the gravel which the surf drives backward and forward on a beach,
[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220.
2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 15.]
{p. 12}
and we may search the detritus that beaches and rivers push along their beds, but we shall not find any stones at all resembling those of the till."[1]
But we need not discuss any further this theory. It is now almost universally abandoned.
We know of no way in which such waves could be formed; if they were formed, they could not find the material to carry over the land; if they did find it, it would not have the markings which are found in the Drift, and it would possess marine fossils not found in the Drift; and the waves would not and could not scratch and groove the rock-surfaces underneath the Drift, as we know they are scratched and grooved.
Let us then dismiss this hypothesis, and proceed to the consideration of the next.
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 69.]
{p. 13}
WE come now to a much more reasonable hypothesis, and one not without numerous advocates even to this day, to wit: that the drift-deposits were caused by icebergs floating down in deep water over the sunken land, loaded with débris from the Arctic shores, which they shed as they melted in the warmer seas of the south.
This hypothesis explains the carriage of enormous blocks weighing hundreds of tons from their original site to where they are now found; but it is open to many unanswerable objections.
In the first place, if the Drift had been deposited under water deep enough to float icebergs, it would present throughout unquestionable evidences of stratification, for the reason that the larger masses of stone would fall more rapidly than the smaller, and would be found at the bottom of the deposit. If, for instance, you were to go to the top of a shot-tower, filled with water, and let loose at the same moment a quantity of cannon-balls, musket-balls, pistol-balls, duck-shot, reed-bird shot, and fine sand, all mixed together, the cannon-balls would reach the bottom first, and the other missiles in the order of their size; and the deposit at the bottom would be found to be regularly stratified, with the sand and the finest shot on top. But nothing of this kind is found in the Drift, especially in the "till"; clay, sand, gravel, stones,
{p. 14}
and bowlders are all found mixed together in the utmost confusion, "higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell."
Says Geikie:
"Neither can till owe its origin to icebergs. If it had been distributed over the sea-bottom, it would assuredly have shown some kind of arrangement. When an iceberg drops its rubbish, it stands to reason that the heavier blocks will reach the bottom first, then the smaller stones, and lastly the finer ingredients. There is no such assortment visible, however, in the normal 'till,' but large and small stones are scattered pretty equally through the clay, which, moreover, is quite unstratified."[1]
This fact alone disposes of the iceberg theory as an explanation of the Drift.
Again: whenever deposits are dropped in the sea, they fall uniformly and cover the surface below with a regular sheet, conforming to the inequalities of the ground, no thicker in one place than another. But in the Drift this is not the case. The deposit is thicker in the valleys and thinner on the hills, sometimes absent altogether on the higher elevations.
"The true bowlder-clay is spread out over the region under consideration as a somewhat widely extended and uniform sheet, yet it may be said to fill up all small valleys and depressions, and to be thin or absent on ridges or rising grounds."[2]
That is to say, it fell as a snow-storm falls, driven by high winds; or as a semi-fluid mass might be supposed to fall, draining down from the elevations and filling up the hollows.
Again: the same difficulty presents itself which we found in the case of "the waves of transplantation." Where did the material of the Drift come from? On what sea-shore, in what river-beds, was this incalculable mass of clay, gravel, and stones found?
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 72.
2. "American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 112.]
{p. 15}
Again: if we suppose the supply to have existed on the Arctic coasts, the question comes,
Would the icebergs have carried it over the face of the continents?
Mr. Croll has shown very clearly[1] that the icebergs nowadays usually sail down into the oceans without a scrap of débris of any kind upon them.
Again: how could the icebergs have made the continuous scratchings or striæ, found under the Drift nearly all over the continents of Europe and America? Why, say the advocates of this theory, the icebergs press upon the bottom of the sea, and with the stones adhering to their base they make those striæ.
But two things are necessary to this: First, that there should be a force great enough to drive the berg over the bottom of the sea when it has once grounded. We know of no such force. On the contrary, we do know that wherever a berg grounds it stays until it rocks itself to pieces or melts away. But, suppose there was such a propelling force, then it is evident that whenever the iceberg floated clear of the bottom it would cease to make the strive, and would resume them only when it nearly stranded again. That is to say, when the water was deep enough for the berg to float clear of the bottom of the sea, there could be no striæ; when the water was too shallow, the berg would not float at all, and there would be no striæ. The berg would mark the rocks only where it neither floated clear nor stranded. Hence we would find striæ only at a certain elevation, while the rocks below or above that level would be free from them. But this is not the case with the drift-markings. They pass over mountains and down into the deepest valleys; they are
[1. "Climate and Time," p. 282.]
{p. 16}
universal within very large areas; they cover the face of continents and disappear under the waves of the sea.
It is simply impossible that the Drift was caused by icebergs. I repeat, when they floated clear of the rocks, of course they would not mark them; when the water was too shallow to permit them to float at all, and so move onward, of course they could not mark them. The striations would occur only when the water was; just deep enough to float the berg, and not deep enough to raise the berg clear of the rocks; and but a small part of the bottom of the sea could fulfill these conditions.
Moreover, when the waters were six thousand feet deep in New England, and four thousand feet deep in Scotland, and over the tops of the Rocky Mountains, where was the rest of the world, and the life it contained?
{p. 17}
WHAT is a glacier? It is a river of ice, crowded by the weight of mountain-ice down into some valley, along which it descends by a slow, almost imperceptible motion, due to a power of the ice, under the force of gravity, to rearrange its molecules. It is fed by the mountains and melted by the sun.
The glaciers are local in character, and comparatively few in number; they are confined to valleys having some general slope downward. The whole Alpine mass does not move down upon the plain. The movement downward is limited to these glacier-rivers.
The glacier complies with some of the conditions of the problem. We can suppose it capable of taking in its giant paw a mass of rock, and using it as a graver to carve deep grooves in the rock below it; and we can see in it a great agency for breaking up rocks and carrying the detritus down upon the plains. But here the resemblance ends.
That high authority upon this subject, James Geikie, says:
"But we can not fail to remark that, although scratched and polished stones occur not infrequently in the frontal moraines of Alpine glaciers, yet at the same time these moraines do not at all resemble till. The moraine consists for the most part of a confused heap of rough angular stones and blocks, and loose sand and débris; scratched
{p. 18}
stones are decidedly in the minority, and indeed a close search will often fail to show them. Clearly, then, the till is not of the nature of a terminal moraine. Each stone in the 'till' gives evidence of having been subjected to a grinding process. …
"We look in vain, however, among the glaciers of the Alps for such a deposit. The scratched stones we may occasionally find, but where is the clay? … It is clear that the conditions for the gathering of a stony clay like the I till' do not obtain (as far as we know) among the Alpine glaciers. There is too much water circulating below the ice there to allow any considerable thickness of such a deposit to accumulate."[1]
But it is questionable whether the glaciers do press with a steady force upon the rocks beneath so as to score them. As a rule, the base of the glacier is full of water; rivers flow from under them. The opposite picture, from Professor Winchell's "Sketches of Creation," page 223, does not represent a mass of ice, bugging the rocks, holding in its grasp great gravers of stone with which to cut the face of the rocks into deep grooves, and to deposit an even coating of rounded stones and clay over the face of the earth.
On the contrary, here are only angular masses of rock, and a stream which would certainly wash away any clay which might be formed.
Let Mr. Dawkins state the case:
"The hypothesis upon which the southern extension is founded--that the bowlder-clays have been formed by ice melting on the land--is open to this objection, that no similar clays have been proved to have been so formed, either in the Arctic regions, where the ice-sheet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers in the Alps or Pyrenees, or in any other mountain-chain. …
The English bowlder-clays, as a whole, differ from
[1. "The Great Ice Age," pp. 70–72.]
{p. 19}
the moraine profonde in their softness, and the large area which they cover. Strata of bowlder-clay at all comparable to the great clay mantle covering the lower grounds of Britain, north of the Thames, are conspicuous by their absence from the glaciated regions of Central Europe and the Pyrenees, which were not depressed beneath the sea."
###
A RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER.
Moreover, the Drift, especially the "till," lies in great continental sheets of clay and gravel, of comparatively uniform thickness. The glaciers could not form such sheets; they deposit their material in long ridges called "terminal moraines."
Agassiz, the great advocate of the ice-origin of the Drift, says:
"All these moraines are the land-marks, so to speak, by which we trace the height and extent, as well as the
[1. Dawkin's "Early Man in Britain," pp. 116, 117.]
{p. 20}
progress and retreat, of glaciers in former times. Suppose, for instance, that a glacier were to disappear entirely. For ages it has been a gigantic ice-raft, receiving all sorts of materials on its surface as it traveled onward, and bearing them along with it; while the hard particles of rocks set in its lower surface have been polishing and fashioning the whole surface over which it extended. As it now melts it drops its various burdens to the ground; bowlders are the milestones marking the different stages of its journey; the terminal and lateral moraines are the frame-work which it erected around itself as it moved forward, and which define its boundaries centuries after it has vanished."[1]
###
TERMINAL MORAINE.
And Professor Agassiz gives us, on page 307 of the same work, the above representation of a "terminal moraine."
The reader can see at once that these semicircular
[1. "Geological Sketches," p. 308.]
{p. 21}
ridges bear no resemblance whatever to the great drift-deposits of the world, spread out in vast and nearly uniform sheets, without stratification, over hills and plains alike.
And here is another perplexity: It might naturally be supposed that the smoothed, scratched, and smashed appearance of the underlying rocks was due to the rubbing and rolling of the stones under the ice of the glaciers; but, strange to say, we find that--
"The scratched and polished rock-surfaces are by no means confined to till-covered districts. They are met with everywhere and at all levels throughout the country, from the sea-coast up to near the tops of some of our higher mountains. The lower hill-ranges, such as the Sidlaws, the Ochils, the Pentlands, the Kilbarchan and Paisley Hills, and others, exhibit polished and smoothed rock-surfaces on their very crest. Similar markings streak and score the rocks up to a great height in the deep valleys of the Highlands."[1]
We can realize, in our imagination, the glacier of the mountain-valley crushing and marking the bed in which it moves, or even the plain on which it discharges itself; but it is impossible to conceive of a glacier upon the bare top of a mountain, without walls to restrain it or direct its flow, or higher ice accumulations to feed it.
Again:
"If glaciers descended, as they did, on both sides of the great Alpine ranges, then we would expect to find the same results on the plains of Northern Italy that present themselves on the low grounds of Switzerland. But this is not the case. On the plains of Italy there are no traces of the stony clay found in Switzerland and all over Europe. Neither are any of the stones of the drift of Italy scratched or striated."[2]
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 73.
2. Ibid., pp. 491, 492.]
{p. 22}
But, strange to say, while, as Geikie admits, no true "till" or Drift is now being formed by or under the glaciers of Switzerland, nevertheless "till" is found in that country disassociated from the glaciers. Geikie says:
"In the low grounds of Switzerland we get a dark, tough clay, packed with scratched and well-rubbed stones, and containing here and there some admixture of sand and irregular beds and patches of earthy gravel. This clay is quite unstratified, and the strata upon which it rests frequently exhibit much confusion, being turned up on end and bent over, exactly as in this country the rocks are sometimes broken and disturbed below till. The whole deposit has experienced much denudation, but even yet it covers considerable areas, and attains a thickness varying from a few feet up to not less than thirty feet in thickness."[1]
Here, then, are the objections to this theory of the glacier-origin of the Drift:
I. The glaciers do not produce striated stones.
II. The glaciers do not produce drift-clay.
III. The glaciers could not have formed continental sheets of "till."
IV. The glaciers could not have existed upon, and consequently could not have striated, the mountain-tops.
V. The glaciers could not have reached to the great plains of the continents far remote from valleys, where we still find the Drift and drift-markings.
VI. The glaciers are limited in number and confined in their operations, and were utterly inadequate to have produced the thousands of square miles of drift-débris which we find enfolding the world.
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 373.]
{p. 23}
WE, come now to the theory which is at present most generally accepted:
It being apparent that glaciers were not adequate to produce the results which we find, the glacialists have fallen back upon an extraordinary hypothesis--to wit, that the whole north and south regions of the globe, extending from the poles to 35° or 40° of north and south latitude, were, in the Drift age, covered with enormous, continuous sheets of ice, from one mile thick at its southern margin, to three or five miles thick at the poles. As they find drift-scratches upon the tops of mountains in Europe three to four thousand feet high, and in New England upon elevations six thousand feet high, it follows, according to this hypothesis, that the ice-sheet must have been considerably higher than these mountains, for the ice must have been thick enough to cover their tops, and high enough and heavy enough above their tops to press down upon and groove and scratch the rocks. And as the striæ in Northern Europe were found to disregard the conformation of the continent and the islands of the sea, it became necessary to suppose that this polar ice-sheet filled up the bays and seas, so that one could have passed dry-shod, in that period, from France to the north pole, over a steadily ascending plane of ice.
No attempt has been made to explain where all this
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ice came from; or what force lifted the moisture into the air which, afterward descending, constituted these world-cloaks of frozen water.
It is, perhaps, easy to suppose that such world-cloaks might have existed; we can imagine the water of the seas falling on the continents, and freezing as it fell, until, in the course of ages, it constituted such gigantic ice-sheets; but something more than this is needed. This does not account for these hundreds of feet of clay, bowlders, and gravel.
But it is supposed that these were torn from the surface of the rocks by the pressure of the ice-sheet moving southward. But what would make it move southward? We know that some of our mountains are covered to-day with immense sheets of ice, hundreds and thousands of feet in thickness. Do these descend upon the flat country? No; they lie there and melt, and are renewed, kept in equipoise by the contending forces of heat and cold.
Why should the ice-sheet move southward? Because, say the "glacialists," the lands of the northern parts of Europe and America were then elevated fifteen hundred feet higher than at present, and this gave the ice a sufficient descent. But what became of that elevation afterward? Why, it went down again. It had accommodatingly performed its function, and then the land resumed its old place!
But did the land rise up in this extraordinary fashion? Croll says:
"The greater elevation of the land (in the Ice period) is simply assumed as an hypothesis to account for the cold. The facts of geology, however, are fast establishing the opposite conclusion, viz., that when the country was covered with ice, the land stood in relation to the sea at a lower level than at present, and that the continental periods or times, when the land stood in relation to the
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sea at a higher level than now, were the warm inter-glacial periods, when the country was free of snow and ice, And a mild and equable condition of climate prevailed. This is the conclusion toward which we are being led by the more recent revelations of surface-geology, and also by certain facts connected with the geographical distribution of plants and animals during the Glacial epoch."[1]
H. B. Norton says:
"When we come to study the cause of these phenomena, we find many perplexing and contradictory theories in the field. A favorite one is that of vertical elevation. But it seems impossible to admit that the circle inclosed within the parallel of 40°--some seven thousand miles in diameter--could have been elevated to such a height as to produce this remarkable result. This would be a supposition hard to reconcile with the present proportion of land and water on the surface of the globe and with the phenomena of terrestrial contraction and gravitation."[2]
We have seen that the surface-rocks underneath the Drift are scored and grooved by some external force. Now we find that these markings do not all run in the same direction; on the contrary, they cross each other in an extraordinary manner. The cut on the following page illustrates this.
If the direction of the motion of the ice-sheets, which caused these markings, was,--as the glacialists allege,--always from the elevated region in the north to the lower ground in the south, then the markings must always have been in the same direction: given a fixed cause, we must have always a fixed result. We shall see, as we go on in this argument, that the deposition of the "till" was instantaneous; and, as these markings were made before or at the same time the "till" was laid down, how could the land
[1. "Climate and Time," p. 391.
2. "Popular Science Monthly," October, 1879, p. 833.]
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possibly have bobbed up and down, now here, now there, so that the elevation from which the ice-sheet descended
###
SKETCH OF GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY POINT, LAKE ERIE, MICHIGAN.
aa, deep water-line; bb border of the bank of earthy materials; cc, deep parallel grooves four and a half feet apart and twenty-five feet long, bearing north 60° east; d, a set of grooves and scratches bearing north 60° west; e, a natural bridge.
[Winchell's "Sketches of Creation," p. 213.]
was one moment in the northeast, and the next moment had whirled away into the northwest? As the poet says:
" … Will these trees,
That have outlived the eagle, page thy steps
And skip, when thou point'st out?"
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But if the point of elevation was whisked away from east to west, how could an ice-sheet a mile thick instantaneously adapt itself to the change? For all these markings took place in the interval between the time when the external force, whatever it was, struck the rocks, and the time when a sufficient body of "till" had been laid down to shield the rocks and prevent further wear and tear. Neither is it possible to suppose an ice-sheet, a mile in thickness, moving in two diametrically opposite directions at the same time.
Again: the ice-sheet theory requires an elevation in the north and a descent southwardly; and it is this descent southwardly which is supposed to have given the momentum and movement by which the weight of the superincumbent mass of ice tore up, plowed up, ground up, and smashed up the face of the surface-rocks, and thus formed the Drift and made the striæ.
But, unfortunately, when we come to apply this theory to the facts, we find that it is the north sides of the hills and mountains that are striated, while the south sides have gone scot-free! Surely, if weight and motion made the Drift, then the groovings, caused by weight and motion, must have been more distinct upon a declivity than upon an ascent. The school-boy toils patiently and slowly up the hill with his sled, but when he descends he comes down with railroad-speed, scattering the snow before him in all directions. But here we have a school-boy that tears and scatters things going up-hill, and sneaks down-hill snail-fashion.
"Professor Hitchcock remarks, that Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire, 3,250 feet high, is scarified from top to bottom on its northern side and western side, but not on, the southern."[1]
This state of things is universal in North America.
[1. Dana's "Manual of Geology," p. 537.]
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But let us look at another point:
If the vast deposits of sand, gravel, clay, and bowlders, which are found in Europe and America, were placed there by a great continental ice-sheet, reaching down from the north pole to latitude 35° or 40°; if it was the ice that tore and scraped up the face of the rocks and rolled the stones and striated them, and left them in great sheets and heaps all over the land--then it follows, as a matter of course, that in all the regions equally near the pole, and equally cold in climate, the ice must have formed a similar sheet, and in like manner have torn up the rocks and ground them into gravel and clay. This conclusion is irresistible. If the cold of the north caused the ice, and the ice caused the Drift, then in all the cold north-lands there must have been ice, and consequently there ought to have been Drift. If we can find, therefore, any extensive cold region of the earth where the Drift is not, then we can not escape the conclusion that the cold and the ice did not make the Drift.
Let us see: One of the coldest regions of the earth is Siberia. It is a vast tract reaching to the Arctic Circle; it is the north part of the Continent of Asia; it is intersected by great mountain-ranges. Here, if anywhere, we should find the Drift; here, if anywhere, was the ice-field, "the sea of ice." It is more elevated and more mountainous than the interior of North America where the drift-deposits are extensive; it is nearer the pole than New York and Illinois, covered as these are with hundreds of feet of débris, and yet there is no Drift in Siberia!
I quote from a high authority, and a firm believer in the theory that glaciers or ice-sheets caused the drift; James Geikie says:
"It is remarkable that nowhere in the great plains of Siberia do any traces of glacial action appear to have
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been observed. If cones and mounds of gravel and great erratics like those that sprinkle so wide an area in Northern America and Northern Europe had occurred, they would hardly have failed to arrest the attention of explorers. Middendorff does, indeed, mention the occurrence of trains of large erratics which he observed along the banks of some of the rivers, but these, he has no doubt, were carried down by river-ice. The general character of the 'tundras' is that of wide, flat plains, covered for the most part with a grassy and mossy vegetation, but here and there bare and sandy. Frequently nothing intervenes to break the monotony of the landscape. … It would appear, then, that ill Northern Asia representatives of the glacial deposits which are met with in similar latitudes in Europe and America do not occur. The northern drift of Russia and Germany; the åsar of Sweden; the kames, eskers, and erratics of Britain; and the iceberg-drift of Northern America have, apparently, no equivalent in Siberia. Consequently we find the great river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in those high latitudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface."[1]
Think of the significance of all this. There is no Drift in Siberia; no "till," no "bowlder-clay," no stratified masses of gravel, sand, and stones. There was, then, no Drift age in all Northern Asia, up to the Arctic Circle!
How pregnant is this admission. It demolishes at one blow the whole theory that the Drift came of the ice. For surely if we could expect to find ice, during the so-called Glacial age, anywhere on the face of our planet, it would be in Siberia. But, if there was an ice-sheet there, it did not grind up the rocks; it did not striate them; it did not roll the fragments into bowlders and pebbles; it rested so quietly on the face of the land that, as Geikie tells us, the pre-glacial deposits throughout Siberia, with their mammalian remains, are still found "lying undisturbed
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 460, published in 1873.]
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on the surface"; and he even thinks that the great mammals, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, "may have survived in Northern Asia down to a comparatively recent date,"[1] ages after they were crushed out of existence by the Drift of Europe and America.
Mr. Geikie seeks to account for this extraordinary state of things by supposing that the climate of Siberia was, during the Glacial age, too dry to furnish snow to make the ice-sheet. But when it is remembered that there was moisture enough, we are told, in Northern Europe and America at that time to form a layer of ice from one to three miles in thickness, it would certainly seem that enough ought to have blown across the eastern line of European Russia to give Siberia a fair share of ice and Drift. The explanation is more extraordinary than the thing it explains. One third of the water of all the oceans must have been carried up, and was circulating around in the air, to descend upon the earth in rain and snow, and yet none of it fell on Northern Asia! And as the line of the continents separating Europe and Asia had not yet been established, it can not be supposed that the Drift ref used to enter Asia out of respect to the geographical lines.
But not alone is the Drift absent from Siberia, and, probably, all Asia; it does not extend even over all Europe. Louis Figuier says that the traces of glacial action "are observed in all the north of Europe, in Russia, Iceland, Norway, Prussia, the British Islands, part of Germany in the north, and even in some parts of the south of Spain."[2] M. Edouard Collomb finds only a "a shred" of the glacial evidences in France, and thinks they were absent from part of Russia!
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 461.
2. "The World before the Deluge," p. 451.]
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And, even in North America, the Drift is not found everywhere. There is a remarkable region, embracing a large area in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, which Professor J. D. Whitney[1] calls "the driftless region," in which no drift, no clays, no gravel, no rock strive or furrows are found. The rock-surfaces have not been ground down and polished. "This is the more remarkable," says Geikie, "seeing that the regions to the north, west, east, and south are all more or less deeply covered with drift-deposits."[2] And, in this region, as in Siberia, the remains of the large, extinct mammalia are found imbedded in the surface-wash, or in cracks or crevices of the limestone.
If the Drift of North America was due to the ice-sheet, why is there no drift-deposit in "the driftless region" of the Northwestern States of America? Surely this region must have been as cold as Illinois, Ohio, etc. It is now the coldest part of the Union. Why should the ice have left this oasis, and refused to form on it? Or why, if it did form on it, did it refuse to tear up the rock-surfaces and form Drift?
Again, no traces of northern drift are found in California, which is surrounded by high mountains, in some of which fragments of glaciers are found even to this day.[3]
According to Foster, the Drift did not extend to Oregon; and, in the opinion of some, it does not reach much beyond the western boundary of Iowa.
Nor can it be supposed that the driftless regions of Siberia, Northwestern America, and the Pacific coast are due to the absence of ice upon them during the Glacial
[1. "Report of the Geological Survey of Wisconsin," vol. i, p. 114.
2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 465.
3. Whitney, "Proceedings of the California Academy of Natural Sciences."]
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age, for in Siberia the remains of the great mammalia, the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the bison, and the horse, are found to this day imbedded in great masses of ice, which, as we shall see, are supposed to have been formed around them at the very coming of the Drift age.
But there is another difficulty:
Let us suppose that on all the continents an ice-belt came down from the north and south poles to 35° or 40° of latitude, and there stood, massive and terrible, like the ice-sheet of Greenland, frowning over the remnant of the world, and giving out continually fogs, snow-storms, and tempests; what, under such circumstances, must have been the climatic conditions of the narrow belt of land which these ice-sheets did not cover?
Louis Figuier says:
"Such masses of ice could only have covered the earth when the temperature of the air was lowered at least some degrees below zero. But organic life is incompatible with such a temperature; and to this cause must we attribute the disappearance of certain species of animals and plants--in particular the rhinoceros and the elephant--which, before this sudden and extraordinary cooling of the globe, appeared to have limited themselves, in immense herds, to Northern Europe, and chiefly to Siberia, where their remains have been found in such prodigious quantities."[1]
But if the now temperate region of Europe and America was subject to a degree of cold great enough to destroy these huge animals, then there could not have been a tropical climate anywhere on the globe. If the line of 35° or 40°, north and south, was several degrees below zero, the equator must have been at least below the frost-point. And, if so, how can we account for the survival,
[1. "The World before the Deluge," p. 462.]
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to our own time, of innumerable tropical plants that can not stand for one instant the breath of frost, and whose fossilized remains are found in the rocks prior to the Drift? As they lived through the Glacial age, it could not have been a period of great and intense cold. And this conclusion is in accordance with the results of the latest researches of the scientists:--
"In his valuable studies upon the diluvial flora, Count Gaston de Saporta concludes that the climate in this period was marked rather by extreme moisture than extreme cold."
Again: where did the clay, which is deposited in such gigantic masses, hundreds of feet thick, over the continents, come from? We have seen (p. 18, ante) that, according to Mr. Dawkins, "no such clay has been proved to have been formed, either in the Arctic regions, whence the ice-sheet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers."
If the Arctic ice-sheet does not create such a clay now, why did it create it centuries ago on the plains of England or Illinois?