Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel | Page 5

must have been great enough to have swept over the tops of high
mountains, for the evidences of the Drift age are found three thousand
feet above the Baltic, four thousand feet high in the Grampians of
Scotland, and six thousand feet high in New England.
In the next place, if this deposit had been swept up from or by the sea,
it would contain marks of its origin. The shells of the sea, the bones of
fish, the remains of seals and whales, would have been taken up by
these great deluges, and carried over the land, and have remained
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 26.]
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mingled in the _débris_ which they deposited. This is not the case. The
unstratified Drift is unfossiliferous, and where the stratified Drift
contains fossils they are the remains of land animals, except in a few
low-lying districts near the sea.
I quote:
"Over the interior of the continent it contains no marine fossils or

relics."[1]
Geikie says:
"Not a single trace of any marine organism has yet been detected in
true till."[2]
Moreover, if the sea-waves made these great deposits, they must have
picked up the material composing them either from the shores of the
sea or the beds of streams. And when we consider the vastness of the
drift-deposits, extending, as they do, over continents, with a depth of
hundreds of feet, it would puzzle us to say where were the sea-beaches
or rivers on the globe that could produce such inconceivable quantities
of gravel, sand, and clay. The production of gravel is limited to a small
marge of the ocean, not usually more than a mile wide, where the
waves and the rocks meet. If we suppose the whole shore of the oceans
around the northern half of America to be piled up with gravel five
hundred feet thick, it would go but a little way to form the immense
deposits which stretch from the Arctic Sea to Patagonia.
The stones of the "till" are strangely marked, striated, and scratched,
with lines parallel to the longest diameter. No such stones are found in
river-beds or on sea-shores.
Geikie says:
"We look in vain for striated stones in the gravel which the surf drives
backward and forward on a beach,
[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220.
2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 15.]
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and we may search the detritus that beaches and rivers push along their
beds, but we shall not find any stones at all resembling those of the
till."[1]

But we need not discuss any further this theory. It is now almost
universally abandoned.
We know of no way in which such waves could be formed; if they were
formed, they could not find the material to carry over the land; if they
did find it, it would not have the markings which are found in the Drift,
and it would possess marine fossils not found in the Drift; and the
waves would not and could not scratch and groove the rock-surfaces
underneath the Drift, as we know they are scratched and grooved.
Let us then dismiss this hypothesis, and proceed to the consideration of
the next.
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 69.]
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CHAPTER IV.
WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS?
WE come now to a much more reasonable hypothesis, and one not
without numerous advocates even to this day, to wit: that the
drift-deposits were caused by icebergs floating down in deep water
over the sunken land, loaded with _débris_ from the Arctic shores,
which they shed as they melted in the warmer seas of the south.
This hypothesis explains the carriage of enormous blocks weighing
hundreds of tons from their original site to where they are now found;
but it is open to many unanswerable objections.
In the first place, if the Drift had been deposited under water deep
enough to float icebergs, it would present throughout unquestionable
evidences of stratification, for the reason that the larger masses of stone

would fall more rapidly than the smaller, and would be found at the
bottom of the deposit. If, for instance, you were to go to the top of a
shot-tower, filled with water, and let loose at the same moment a
quantity of cannon-balls, musket-balls, pistol-balls, duck-shot,
reed-bird shot, and fine sand, all mixed together, the cannon-balls
would reach the bottom first, and the other missiles in the order of their
size; and the deposit at the bottom would be found to be regularly
stratified, with the sand and the finest shot on top. But nothing of this
kind is found in the Drift, especially in the "till"; clay, sand, gravel,
stones,
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and bowlders are all found mixed together in the utmost confusion,
"higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell."
Says Geikie:
"Neither can till owe