Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/103

1864.] use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth? We have our answer in the fertile soil which spreads over the temperate regions of the globe. The glacier was God's great plough; and when the ice vanished from the face of the land, it left it prepared for the hand of the husbandman. The hard surface of the rocks was ground to powder, the elements of the soil were mingled in fair proportions, granite was carried into the lime regions, lime was mingled with the more arid and unproductive granite districts, and a soil was prepared fit for the agricultural uses of man. I have been asked whether this inference was not inconsistent with the fact that a rich vegetation preceded the ice-period,—a vegetation sufficiently abundant to sustain the tropical animals then living throughout the temperate regions. But the vegetation which has succeeded the ice-period is of a different character, and one that could not have flourished on a soil that would nourish a more tropical growth. The soil we have now over the temperate zone is a grain-growing soil,—one especially adapted to those plants most necessary to the higher domestic and social organizations of the human race. Therefore I think we may believe that God did not shroud the world He had made in snow and ice without a purpose, and that this, like many other operations of His Providence, seemingly destructive and chaotic in its first effects, is nevertheless a work of beneficence and order.

In the next article, in order to put the reader in possession of the glacial question as it stands at present, I shall say something of the possible causes of this extraordinary accumulation of snow,—though all such explanations are thus far mere suggestions,—and shall also give some more precise estimates of the changes of temperature involved in the history of the glacial period, before proceeding to the consideration of the effects produced by the breaking-up of the ice, as shown in our stratified lowland drift, and in our estuaries and river-terraces.

I was preparing my article for the "Atlantic," our friend Bob Stephens burst in upon us, in some considerable heat, with a newspaper in his hand.

"Well, girls, your time is come now! You women have been preaching heroism and sacrifice to us,—so splendid to go forth and suffer and die for our country,—and now comes the test of feminine patriotism."

"Why, what's the matter now?" said Jennie, running eagerly to look over his shoulder at the paper.

"No more foreign goods," said he, waving it aloft,—"no more gold shipped to Europe for silks, laces, jewels, kid gloves, and what-not. Here it is,—great movement, headed by senators' and generals' wives, Mrs. General Butler, Mrs. John P. Hale, Mrs. Henry Wilson, and so on, a long string of them, to buy no more imported articles during the war."

"But I don't see how it can be done," said Jennie.

"Why," said I, "do you suppose that 'nothing to wear' is made in America?"