Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel | Page 3

valleys.[4]
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 21.
2. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220.
3. "American Cyclop?dia," vol. vi, p. 111.
4. "Great Ice Age," Geikie, p. 6.]
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"The lowest member is invariably a tough, stony clay, called 'till' or 'hard-pan.' Throughout wide districts stony clay alone occurs."[1]
"It is hard to say whether the till consists more of stones or of clay."[2]
This "till," this first deposit, will be found to be the strangest and most interesting.
In the second place, although the Drift is found on the earth, it is unfossiliferous. That is to say, it contains no traces of pre-existent or contemporaneous life.
This, when we consider it, is an extraordinary fact:
Where on the face of this life-marked earth could such a mass of material be gathered up, and not contain any evidences of life? It is as if one were to say that he had collected the detritus of a great city, and that it showed no marks of man's life or works.
"I would reiterate," says Geikie,[3] "that nearly all the Scotch shell-bearing beds belong to the very close of the glacial period; only in one or two places have shells ever been obtained, with certainty, from a bed in the true till of Scotland. They occur here and there in bowlder-clay, and underneath bowlder-clay, in maritime districts; but this clay, as I have shown, is more recent than the till--fact, rests upon its eroded surface."
"The lower bed of the drift is entirely destitute of organic remains."[4]
Sir Charles Lyell tells us that even the stratified drift is usually devoid of fossils:
"Whatever may be the cause, the fact is certain that over large areas in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, I might add throughout the northern hemisphere, on both sides of the Atlantic, the stratified drift of the glacial period is very commonly devoid of fossils."[5]
[1. "Great Ice Age," Geikie, p. 7.
2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 342.
4. Rev. O. Fisher, quoted in "The World before the Deluge," p. 461.
5. "Antiquity of Man," third edition, p. 268.]
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In the next place, this "till" differs from the rest of the Drift in its exceeding hardness:
"This till is so tough that engineers would much rather excavate the most obdurate rocks than attempt to remove it from their path. Hard rocks are more or less easily assailable with gunpowder, and the numerous joints and fissures by which they are traversed enable the workmen to wedge them out often in considerable lumps. But till has neither crack nor joint; it will not blast, and to pick it to pieces is a very slow and laborious process. Should streaks of sand penetrate it, water will readily soak through, and large masses will then run or collapse, as soon as an opening is made into it."
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TILL OVERLAID WITH BOWLDER-CLAY, RIVER STINCHAR. r, Rock; t, Till; g, Bowlder-Clay; x, Fine Gravel, etc.
The accompanying cut shows the manner in which it is distributed, and its relations to the other deposits of the Drift.
In this "till" or "hard-pan" are found some strange and characteristic stones. They are bowlders, not water-worn, not rounded, as by the action of waves, and yet not angular--for every point and projection has been ground off. They are not very large, and they differ in this and other respects from the bowlders found in the other portions of the Drift. These stones in the "till" are always striated--that is, cut by deep lines or grooves, usually running lengthwise, or parallel to their longest diameter. The cut on the following page represents one of them.
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Above this clay is a deposit resembling it, and yet differing from it, called the "bowlder-clay." This is not so tough or hard. The bowlders in it are larger and more angular-sometimes they are of immense size; one at
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SCRATCHED STONE (BLACK SHALE), FROM THE TILL.
Bradford, Massachusetts, is estimated to weigh 4,500,000 pounds. Many on Cape Cod are twenty feet in diameter. One at Whitingham, Vermont, is forty-three feet long by thirty feet high, or 40,000 cubic feet in bulk. In some
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cases no rocks of the same material are found within two hundred miles.[1]
These two formations--the "till" and the "bowlder-clay"--sometimes pass into each other by insensible degrees. At other times the distinction is marked. Some of the stones in the bowlder-clay are furrowed or striated, but a large part of them are not; while in the "till" the stone not striated is the rare exception.
Above this bowlder-clay we find sometimes beds of loose gravel, sand, and stones, mixed with the remains of man and other animals. These have all the appearance of being later in their deposition, and of having been worked over by the action of water and ice.
This, then, is, briefly stated, the condition of the Drift.
It is plain that it was the result of violent action of some kind.
And this action must have taken place