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This group includes all rocks made of sediments, their materials having settled either in water upon the bottoms of rivers, lakes, or seas, or on dry land, as in the case of deposits made by the wind and by glaciers.
The readers of the "Glaciers of the Alps" have made the acquaintance of Professor Tyndall as an Alpine adventurer, with a passion for frost and philosophy, and a remarkable ability both in describing his mountain-experiences and in explaining the interesting phenomena which he there encountered. All who have read this inimitable volume will testify to its rare attractions.
But how many of these vestiges of the past still remain to be discovered! how many of these valuable evidences of the bravery and spirit of enterprise of the Scandinavian race are for ever buried under the glaciers! We have also obtained evidence that Christianity had been brought into America, and especially into Greenland.
There were peaks like castles, spires like the fretted stonework of Indian minarets, wrought by the hand of nature out of an awful cold purity, and mountains which resembled nothing I had ever seen or dreamed of, banded white with broken edges of green by winding glaciers; while sombered forests, every trunk in which the surveyor said exceeded two hundred feet in height, were wrapped about their knees.
Down from the Sierras, mighty glaciers carried the soil for this central valley, grinding and pulverizing it as it was rolled slowly along. Many years this process continued.
I hope that when you visit the London diggings you may find the truth of this; but it will be time enough to speak of that subject when you return from rambling on the glaciers of Switzerland, where, by the way, the dirt, rubbish, and wrack, called moraines, which lie at the foot of the glaciers, will serve to remind you of the gold-fields to which I have referred, for much of what composes those moraines was once solid rock in a fixed position on the heights, or glittering ice which reflected the sun's dazzling rays on surrounding high life, though it lies low in the earth now.
In general, the north sides are concave in both their horizontal and vertical sections, having been sculptured into this shape by the residual glaciers that lingered in the protecting northern shadows, while the sun-beaten south sides, having never been subjected to this kind of glaciation, are convex or irregular.
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.
When the sublime ice-floods of the glacial period poured down the flank of the Range over what is now Yosemite Valley, they were compelled to break through a dam of domes extending across from Mount Starr King to North Dome; and as the period began to draw near a close the shallowing ice-currents were divided and the South Dome was, perhaps, the first to emerge, burnished and shining like a mirror above the surface of the icy sea; and though it has sustained the wear and tear of the elements tens of thousands of years, it yet remains a telling monument of the action of the great glaciers that brought it to light.
The temporary conversion of these glens into glacier-lakes is the more conceivable, because the hills at their upper ends not being lofty nor of great extent, they may not have been filled with ice at a time when great glaciers were generated in other adjoining and much higher regions. Secondly. The shelves, says Mr.
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