Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/374

358 imparts any entire exemption from the influence of authority, and bestows complete independence from the tendency to "swear to the words of a master."

Of the New York geologists, Vanuxem alone, in his Geology of the Third District, 1842, inclined to the glacial theory; the others—Emmons, Mather, and Hall—advocated floating ice, the latter urging as a chief objection the absence of any great northern highlands from which glaciers could extend southward. Prof. Henry D. Rogers advocated De la Beche's view, of great catastrophic waves or débacles of water and ice, produced by sudden uplifts of the floor of a circumpolar ocean, and sweeping southward with tremendous power over the middle latitudes. These views were presented by him in 1844, at the Washington meeting of the geologists, and are to us a most curious illustration of the old "cataclysmic" phase of geological conceptions.

Two years later Agassiz came to America, and at once set about studying the ice evidences here, first in the White Mountains and then around the Great Lakes. At the first meeting of the American Association, in 1848, he presented his views as to the identity of our phenomena with those studied by himself, Desor, and Guyot abroad. His views were not very warmly received, however, and he did not attempt their public presentation again for some years, turning his attention more to the field of zoölogy. In 1850, in a work on Lake Superior, he refers somewhat sharply to the prejudice that seemed to prevail in relation to this subject.

From this time, however, the aqueous theories began to be less strongly presented; and a new generation of geologists was coming on, largely under the training of Guyot and Agassiz, and more open to their observed results. C. B. Adams, in 1850, presented a view nearly akin to that adopted by Dana a few years later, of an elevation of the high northern latitudes, resulting in a southward-moving glacial sheet, and a subsequent depression connected with its retreat, to account for the stratified deposits. Professor Dana accepted this doctrine in his presidential address before the association in 1855, adding the "Terrace period" of partial re-elevation. Prom this time he became the leader of the American glacialists, and his great Manual, issued in 1862, carried these views into all the colleges of the country.

In 1857 Prof. Edward Hitchcock published an important treatise on Surface Geology, particularly of the Connecticut Valley, in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. In this paper he noted the distinction, so important and now so familiar, between local striae and those with the general southward course of the "drift." Two years later his son, Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, extended this distinction