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Updated: May 22, 2025


As the ice stream itself shrinks, a portion of the detritus next the boundary wall is apt to be left clinging against those slopes. It is from the presence of these heaps in valleys now abandoned by glaciers that we obtain some information as to the former greater extent of glacial action. The next most noticeable feature is the crevasse.

In Florida, and around the northern side of the Gulf of Mexico, there had probably been a greater fusion of the two races. But in origin the two peoples are distinct; the one came from north-eastern Asia, the other, I believe, from a tropical country joined on to the present continent, that was submerged at the breaking up of the glacial period.

The other paper-weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk, belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels of civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trained barbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of a rude, solitary, savage hunter.

But geologists have connected them with the alternating rise and fall of the surface of the northern continent and its altitude at various times above the level of the sea. Thus it seems probable that the glacial period with the ice sheet of which we have spoken was brought about by a great elevation of the land, accompanied by a change to intense cold.

Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague vague. Please observe: In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.

The same idea is applied to the explanation of a similar anomaly in the Fauna of the Aegean: That epoch was doubtless the newer Pliocene or Glacial Era, when the Mya truncata and other northern forms now extinct in the Mediterranean, and found fossil in the Sicilian tertiaries, ranged into that sea.

Such appearances accord well with the hypothesis of the successive phases of glacial action in Switzerland, to which I shall presently advert. In the fine section thus exposed Signor Gastaldi and I had an opportunity of observing the internal structure of the glacial formation.

I believe the above difficulty may be surmounted by looking to still earlier changes of climate of an opposite nature. We have good reason to believe that during the newer Pliocene period, before the Glacial epoch, and whilst the majority of the inhabitants of the world were specifically the same as now, the climate was warmer than at the present day.

North of about the forty-first degree of latitude probably the southern limit of the once glacial region a reservoir system prevails toward the headwaters of all the streams. It includes New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and to the Rocky Mountains divide, and all of the British Provinces to the Arctic Circle. It also somewhat occurs on the western slope of the Rockies.

We have seen Creation, and have exulted in it. We have seen Destruction, and have exulted in it. We have watched the long, quivering Shadow of Life shudder across our glacial promontory, and we have watched that drowning tide receive it. It is enough. It is well. We have had our Vision. We know now what gives to the gods "that look" their faces wear.

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