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Moreover, even though the underlying rock and the original topography be of the same kind in both cases, the average yield of crops per acre is greater where the ice has done its work. Where the country rock consists of limestone, which naturally forms a rich soil, the difference in favor of the glaciated area amounts to only 1 or 2 per cent.
Juniper is being rooted up; boggy patches drained and cultivated cranberries are being planted, and oats grown; paths engineered to the best points of view; rocks bared to examine the geology though you cannot get the Professor to agree that every inch of his territory has been glaciated.
The great lakes of North America are permanent memorials of its Ice-Age, and over more than half the country we trace the imprint and the relics of the sheet. South America, Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand had their glaciated areas. North Asia was largely glaciated, but the range of the ice-sheet is not yet determined in that continent.
We arrived in Esquimault Harbor, three miles from Victoria, on the evening of the fourth day, and drove to the town through a magnificent forest of Douglas spruce, with an undergrowth in open spots of oak, madrone, hazel, dogwood, alder, spiraea, willow, and wild rose, and around many an upswelling moutonne rock, freshly glaciated and furred with yellow mosses and lichens.
In poetic fashion, yet with scientific accuracy, John Muir thus describes their origin in his Mountains of California, a book every Tahoe lover should possess: When a mountain lake is born, when, like a young eye, it first opens to the light, it is an irregular, expressionless crescent, inclosed in banks of rock and ice, bare, glaciated rock on the lower side, the rugged snout of a glacier on the upper.
Beneath their lake- like expanse of sluggish or stagnant ice a broad sheet of ground moraine is probably being deposited. Cirques and glaciated valleys rapidly lose their characteristic forms after the ice has withdrawn. The weather destroys all smoothed, polished, and scored surfaces which are not protected beneath glacial deposits.
Flint nodules or other small prominences in the bed rock are found more worn on the stoss than on the lee side, where indeed they may have a low cone of rock protected by them from abrasion. Cavities, on the other hand, have their edges worn on the lee side and left sharp upon the stoss. Surfaces worn and torn in the ways which we have mentioned are said to be glaciated.
The remains of Pleistocene man are naturally found either in caverns, where they escaped destruction by the ice sheets, or in deposits outside the glaciated area. In both cases it is extremely difficult, or quite impossible, to assign the remains to definite glacial or interglacial times. Their relative age is best told by the fauna with which they are associated.
They had the appearance of old sea cliffs; here and there were small clumps of conifers, and in two places tall cascades. The nearer ground was strewn with glaciated boulders and supported nothing but a stunted Alpine vegetation of compact clustering stems and stalkless flowers. No river was visible, but the air was full of the rush and babble of a torrent close at hand.
So, too, the section of the Cordilleras lying to the east of what is commonly called the Great Basin, between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, has also enjoyed a long reign of peace. In glaciated countries the record is naturally less clear than in those parts of the world which have been subjected to long-continued, slow decay of the rocks.
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