Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/803

Rh an unstratified mass of clay or mud, through which a variety of angular and rubbed stones were scattered, and a marked proportion of the whole were polished and scratched, and the clay rendered so compact, as if by the incumbent pressure of a great mass of ice, that it has been found necessary to blow it up with gunpowder in making railway cuttings through part of it. A marble rock, of the age of our Portland stone, on which this old moraine rests has its surface polished like a looking-glass, displaying beautiful sections of fossil shells, while occasionally, besides finer striæ, there are deeper rectilinear grooves, agreeing in direction with the course in which the extinct glacier moved according to the theory of M. Guyot before explained.

It is evident that, to have produced such effects as are here described, the glacier must have extended much beyond Soleure, and have been very thick even there. It thus proves to demonstration that a glacier can travel for a hundred miles over a generally level country, that it can pass over hills and valleys, and that, even near its termination, it can groove, and grind, and polish rocks, and deposit large masses of hard bowlder clay. And all this was done by a single glacier issuing from a comparatively narrow valley, and then spreading out over an area many times greater than that of its whole previous course. In this case it is clear that such a vast mass of ice, constituting a veritable ice-sheet on a small scale, could not have derived its motion solely from the push given to it by the parent glacier at St. Maurice. Neither could gravitation derived from the slope of the ground have affected it, for it passed mostly over level ground or up slopes, and its termination at Soleure is actually nearly two hundred feet higher than its starting point at the mouth of the valley below St. Moritz! There remains as a cause of motion only the slope of the upper surface of the glacier, the ice slowly flowing downward, and, by means of its tenacity and its viscosity on a large scale, dragging its lower portion still more slowly over the uneven or upward sloping surface. This mode of motion will be discussed later when dealing with the origin of lake-basins.

No doubt at this epoch of maximum glaciation the ice-sheet extended over the whole country between the Bernese Alps and the Jura, and the downward flow of the lateral glaciers along the valley of the Sarine, Aare, and other rivers flowing toward Soleure greatly assisted the general onward motion. But the fact remains, and it can not be too strongly insisted on, that here we have a veritable ice-sheet moving over hill and valley, carrying on its surface quantities of erratic blocks, rounding, striating, and polishing the rocks over which it passed, and with the material thus crushed and ground away forming great deposits of bowlder clay, much of which still remains, although enormous quantities