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A victory of human mind and human strength over the dominion and powers of Nature; a deed that lifts us above the grey monotony of daily life; a view over shining plains, with lofty mountains against the cold blue sky, and lands covered by ice-sheets of inconceivable extent; a vision of long-vanished glacial times; the triumph of the living over the stiffened realm of death.
This summary statement will convey some idea of the extraordinary phase through which the earth passed in the early part of the present geological era. But it must be added that a singular circumstance prolonged the glacial regime in the northern hemisphere. Modern geologists speak rather of a series of successive ice-sheets than of one definite Ice-Age.
Already the listener might hear the ice-sheets crack and start; soon they will be gone, and her deep devotion will set as strong towards him as the tide of the torrent towards its receiving sea. "Fine writing!" perhaps the reader will say; but surely none too fine to describe the most beautiful thing in this strange world, the irrevocable gift of a good woman's love!
One curious feature noted in this blizzard was the fact that huge ice-sheets as big as window-panes, and about a quarter of an inch thick, were being hurled about by the wind, making it as dangerous to walk about outside as if one were in an avalanche of splintered glass.
the great glacial cirques, with their stupendous precipices from which the vast ice-sheets started, which gouged, smoothed, planed and grooved millions of acres of solid granite into lake-beds, polished domes and canyon walls and carried along millions of tons of rock debris to make scores of lateral and terminal moraines; together with the evidences of uplift, subsidence and volcanic outpouring of diorite and other molten rocks, afford one as vast and enjoyable a field for contemplation as any ordinary man can find in the Grand Canyon.
We owe a debt to all that has gone before: to the heavens above and to the earth-fires beneath, to the ice-sheets that ground down the mountains, and to the ocean currents. Just as we owe a debt to the men and women in our line of descent, so we owe a debt to the ruder primordial forces that shaped the planet to our use, and took a hand in the game of animal life.
We have given no explanation at all why the ice-sheets, which we would in a general way be prepared to expect, appear in India and Australia, instead of farther north and south. Since the outer polar regions themselves had been semi-tropical up to that time, it is very difficult to see how this will account for a freezing temperature in such latitudes as Australia and India.
Most of Europe north of the Thames and the Danube, nearly all Canada and a very large part of the United States, and a somewhat less expanse of Northern Asia, bear to this day the deep scars of the thick, moving ice-sheets.
At length the ice-sheets of Scandinavia met the spreading sheets from Scotland and Wales, and crept over Russia and Germany, and an almost continuous mantle, from which only a few large areas of arctic vegetation peeped out, was thrown over the greater part of Europe.
Some, indeed, speak of a series of Ice-Ages, but we need not discuss the verbal question. It is now beyond question that the ice-sheet advanced and retreated several times during the Glacial Epoch. The American and some English geologists distinguished six ice-sheets, with five intermediate periods of more temperate climate.
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