Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel | Page 9

it became necessary to suppose that
this polar ice-sheet filled up the bays and seas, so that one could have
passed dry-shod, in that period, from France to the north pole, over a
steadily ascending plane of ice.
No attempt has been made to explain where all this

{p. 24}
ice came from; or what force lifted the moisture into the air which,
afterward descending, constituted these world-cloaks of frozen water.
It is, perhaps, easy to suppose that such world-cloaks might have
existed; we can imagine the water of the seas falling on the continents,
and freezing as it fell, until, in the course of ages, it constituted such
gigantic ice-sheets; but something more than this is needed. This does
not account for these hundreds of feet of clay, bowlders, and gravel.
But it is supposed that these were torn from the surface of the rocks by
the pressure of the ice-sheet moving southward. But what would make
it move southward? We know that some of our mountains are covered
to-day with immense sheets of ice, hundreds and thousands of feet in
thickness. Do these descend upon the flat country? No; they lie there
and melt, and are renewed, kept in equipoise by the contending forces
of heat and cold.
Why should the ice-sheet move southward? Because, say the
"glacialists," the lands of the northern parts of Europe and America
were then elevated fifteen hundred feet higher than at present, and this
gave the ice a sufficient descent. But what became of that elevation
afterward? Why, it went down again. It had accommodatingly
performed its function, and then the land resumed its old place!
But did the land rise up in this extraordinary fashion? Croll says:
"The greater elevation of the land (in the Ice period) is simply assumed
as an hypothesis to account for the cold. The facts of geology, however,
are fast establishing the opposite conclusion, viz., that when the
country was covered with ice, the land stood in relation to the sea at a
lower level than at present, and that the continental periods or times,
when the land stood in relation to the
{p. 25}
sea at a higher level than now, were the warm inter-glacial periods,

when the country was free of snow and ice, And a mild and equable
condition of climate prevailed. This is the conclusion toward which we
are being led by the more recent revelations of surface-geology, and
also by certain facts connected with the geographical distribution of
plants and animals during the Glacial epoch."[1]
H. B. Norton says:
"When we come to study the cause of these phenomena, we find many
perplexing and contradictory theories in the field. A favorite one is that
of vertical elevation. But it seems impossible to admit that the circle
inclosed within the parallel of 40°--some seven thousand miles in
diameter--could have been elevated to such a height as to produce this
remarkable result. This would be a supposition hard to reconcile with
the present proportion of land and water on the surface of the globe and
with the phenomena of terrestrial contraction and gravitation."[2]
We have seen that the surface-rocks underneath the Drift are scored and
grooved by some external force. Now we find that these markings do
not all run in the same direction; on the contrary, they cross each other
in an extraordinary manner. The cut on the following page illustrates
this.
If the direction of the motion of the ice-sheets, which caused these
markings, was,--as the glacialists allege,--always from the elevated
region in the north to the lower ground in the south, then the markings
must always have been in the same direction: given a fixed cause, we
must have always a fixed result. We shall see, as we go on in this
argument, that the deposition of the "till" was instantaneous; and, as
these markings were made before or at the same time the "till" was laid
down, how could the land
[1. "Climate and Time," p. 391.
2. "Popular Science Monthly," October, 1879, p. 833.]
{p. 26}

possibly have bobbed up and down, now here, now there, so that the
elevation from which the ice-sheet descended
###
SKETCH OF GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY
POINT, LAKE ERIE, MICHIGAN.
aa, deep water-line; bb border of the bank of earthy materials; cc, deep
parallel grooves four and a half feet apart and twenty-five feet long,
bearing north 60° east; d, a set of grooves and scratches bearing north
60° west; e, a natural bridge.
[Winchell's "Sketches of Creation," p. 213.]
was one moment in the northeast, and the next moment had whirled
away into the northwest? As the poet says:
". . . Will these trees, That have outlived the eagle, page thy steps And
skip, when thou point'st out?"
{p. 27}
But if