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Updated: May 17, 2025
M. Guyot had endeavoured to show that the Alpine erratics, instead of being scattered at random over the Jura and the great plain of Switzerland, are arranged in a certain determinate order strictly analogous to that which ought to prevail if they had once constituted the lateral, medial, and terminal moraines of great glaciers.
Now some or all the marks above enumerated, the moraines, erratics, polished surfaces, domes, striae, and perched rocks are observed in the Alps at great heights above the present glaciers and far below their actual extremities; also in the great valley of Switzerland, 50 miles broad; and almost everywhere on the Jura, a chain which lies to the north of this valley.
Here, therefore, we have proof that the transport of erratics continued to take place, not merely when the sea was inhabited by the existing Testacea, but when the north of Europe had already assumed that remarkable feature of its physical geography, which separates the Baltic from the North Sea, and causes the Gulf of Bothnia to have only one-fourth of the saltness belonging to the ocean.
James Hall, state geologist of New York, author of many able and well-known works on geology and palaeontology, I examined the glacial drift and erratics of the county of Berkshire, Massachusetts, and those of the adjoining parts of the state of New York, a district about 130 miles inland from the Atlantic coast and situated due west of Boston in latitude 42 degrees 25 minutes north.
Fine sections were thus revealed along the shore, which with their colors, brightened with showers and late-blooming leaves and flowers, beguiled the weariness of the way. The shingle in front of these marble cliffs is also mostly marble, well polished and rounded and mixed with a small percentage of glacier-borne slate and granite erratics.
As to central England, or the country north of the Thames and Bristol Channel, marine shells of the glacial period sometimes reach as high as 600 and 700 feet, and erratics still higher, as we have seen above. But this region is of such moderate elevation above the sea, that it would be almost equally laid under water, were there a sinking of no more than 600 feet.
The tide was low when we arrived, and I noticed that the exposed boulders on the beach granite erratics that had been dropped by the melting ice toward the close of the glacial period were piled in parallel rows at right angles to the shore-line, out of the way of the canoes that had belonged to the village.
Yet, even as this iceberg theory loomed large and larger before the geological world, observations were making in a different field that were destined to show its fallacy. As early as 1815 a sharp-eyed chamois-hunter of the Alps, Perraudin by name, had noted the existence of the erratics, and, unlike most of his companion hunters, had puzzled his head as to how the bowlders got where he saw them.
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