Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/102

92 to form an approximate idea of the great ice-sheet stretching over the northern part of this continent during the glacial period. It would seem that man was intended to decipher the past history of his home, for some remnants or traces of all its great events are left as a key to the whole. Greenland and the Arctic regions hold all that remains of the glacial period in North America. Their shrunken ice-fields, formidable as they seem to us, are to the frozen masses of that secular winter but as the patches of snow and ice lingering on the north side of our hills after the spring has opened; let us expand them in imagination till they extend over half the continent, and we shall have a sufficiently vivid picture of this frozen world. And a temperature which would bring the climate of Greenland down to the fortieth degree of latitude would not only render the field of ice far more extensive, but thousands of feet thicker than it is at present. The physical configuration of Greenland also confirms the possibility of a glacial period in America, for there we have at this moment a wide expanse of land unbroken by mountains, over which a uniform sheet of ice moves southward, with occasional variations of its trend according to the undulations of the surface. The interesting accounts of Dr. Rink show that in reality Greenland is a miniature picture of the ice-period. The immense number of icebergs breaking off and floating southward every summer gives us some idea of the annual waste and renewal of the ice. How can we doubt, that, when, under the same latitude, Norway, Sweden, Scotland, England, and Ireland were covered by sheets of ice many thousand feet in height, the ice-fields of Greenland must have shared in the same climatic influences, and have been much thicker and far more extensive than they are at present?

Notwithstanding the absence of lofty mountain-chains in America, we are not wholly without the means of measuring the thickness of the ice-sheet, by comparing it, as in Europe, with some of our highest elevations. The slopes of the Alleghany range, wherever they have been examined, are glacier-worn to the very top, with the exception of a few points; but these points are sufficient to give us data for the comparison. Mount Washington, for instance, is over six thousand feet high, and the rough, unpolished surface of its summit, covered with loose fragments, just below the level of which glacier-marks come to an end, tells us that it lifted its head alone above the desolate waste of ice and snow. In this region, then, the thickness of the sheet cannot have been much less than six thousand feet, and this is in keeping with the same kind of evidence in other parts of the country; for, wherever the mountains are much below six thousand feet, the ice seems to have passed directly over them, while the few peaks rising to that height are left untouched. And while we can thus sink our plummet from the summit to the base of Mount Washington and measure the thickness of the mass of ice, we have a no less accurate indication of its extension in the undulating line marking the southern termination of the drift. I have shown that the moraines mark the oscillations of the glaciers in Europe. Where such accumulations of loose materials took place at its terminus, there we know the glacier must have held its ground long enough to allow time for the collection of these débris. In the same way we may trace the southern border of our ancient ice-sheet on this continent by the limit of the boulders; beyond that line it evidently did not advance as a solid mass, since it ceased to transport the heavier materials. But as soon as the outskirts of the ice began to yield and to flow off as water, the lighter portions of the drift were swept onward; and hence we find a sheet of finer drift-deposit, sand and gravel more or less distinctly stratified, carried to greater or less distances, and fading into the Southern States, where it mingles with the most recent river-deposits.

One naturally asks, What was the