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Updated: May 8, 2025
I was long in doubt on some points concerning the origin of those taluses. Plainly enough they were derived from the cliffs above them, because they are of the size of scars on the wall, the rough angular surface of which contrasts with the rounded, glaciated, unfractured parts.
In the presence of these glaciated surfaces we cannot doubt that the area of the drift has been overridden by vast sheets of ice which, in their steady flow, rasped and scored the rock bed beneath by means of the stones with which their basal layers were inset, and in places plucked and shattered it.
On mountains now destitute of glaciers, but whose glaciation shows that they have supported glaciers in the past, there are found similar crescentic hollows with high, precipitous walls and glaciated floors. Their floors are often basined and hold lakelets whose deep and quiet waters reflect the sheltering ramparts of rugged rock which tower far above them.
It is of little use writing about distances covered and dangers overcome in this connection, but if one considers that the Western Geological Party surveyed, examined, charted, photographed, and to some extent plodded over a mountainous, heavily glaciated land lying in an area of the entire acreage of Kent, Sussex, Hants, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall, one gets a fair idea of what "Griff" and Co. were playing at.
During the Glacial Epoch, the Rocky Mountain summits were considerably glaciated, the amount varying according to altitude and latitude. The general topography of the Colorado River was about as it is to-day, and the rainfall in the valleys probably nearly the same, or at least only a little greater. In other words, the conditions were those of to-day intensified.
To this era belongs the well-known locality of Bridlington, near the mouth of the Humber, in Yorkshire, where about seventy species or well-marked varieties of shells have been found on the coast, near the sea-level, in a bed of sand several feet thick resting on glacial clay with much chalk debris, and covered by a deposit of purple clay with glaciated boulders.
Towards evening they noticed through their glasses that several apparently island peaks in the southern hemisphere, which was turned towards them, became white, from which they concluded that a snow-storm was in progress. The south polar region was also markedly glaciated, though the icecap was not as extensive as either of those at the poles of the earth.
But all along the upper freshly glaciated margin of the lake-bearing zone, every hollow, however small, lying within reach of any portion of the close network of streams, contains a bright, brimming pool; so that the landscape viewed from the mountain-tops seems to be sown broadcast with them.
That the domain of the sea is being slowly extended over the land by incessant wave-action is well known; but in this freshly glaciated region the shores have been so short a time exposed to wave-action that they are scarcely at all wasted.
In my description of the mines of Santo Domingo I have only briefly alluded to the scarcity of alluvial gold in the valleys. It may be correlated with a similar scarcity in the glaciated valleys of Nova Scotia and North Wales, in the neighbourhood of auriferous quartz veins, and is probably due to the same cause.
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