THE GLACIAL HYPOTHESIS 3° 7 



material, transported by a mighty current of water which, he supposed, 

 rushed over the land during the last grand deluge, accounts of which 

 had been handed down by tradition and preserved in the archives of 

 all people. " Although," he says, " it is commonly supposed that the 

 deluge was intended solely for the punishment of the corrupt ante- 

 diluvians, it is not improbable that the descendants of Noah reap many 

 advantages from its influence, since the various soils underwent modi- 

 fications and admixtures which render them better adapted for the 

 wants of man. May not the hand of benevolence be seen working even 

 amid the waters of the deluge ? " he asks. It is, perhaps, doubtful if 

 the hard-fisted occupants of many of Maine's rocky farms would be 

 disposed to take so cheerful a view of the matter. 



Substantially the same views were advanced by Jackson in his 

 report on the geology of Khode Island, which appeared in 1839. 



There can not remain a doubt but that a violent current of water 

 has rushed over the surface of the state since the elevation and consolida- 

 tion of all the rocks and subsequent to the deposition of the Tertiary clay, 

 and that this current came from the north. . . . Upon the surface of solid 

 ledges, wherever they have been recently uncovered of their soil, scratches are 

 seen running north and south, and the hard rocks are more or less polished by 

 the currents of water which at the diluvial epoch coursed over their surfaces, 

 carrying along the pebbles and sand which effected this abrasion, leaving stria, 

 all of which run north and south, deviating a few degrees occasionally with the 

 changes of direction given to the current by the obstacles in its way. 



He did not accept the theory of drifting icebergs; 'nor,' he wrote, 

 ' can we allow that any glaciers could have produced them by their 

 loads of sliding rocks, for in that case they should have radiated from 

 the mountains instead of following a uniform course along hillsides 

 and through valleys.' 



Although primarily a paleontologist, Timothy Conrad was some- 

 times drawn out of his chosen field by phenomena too obvious to be 

 overlooked and concerning the nature of which little was actually 

 known by the best authorities. The occurrence of enormous boulders 

 in the drift, resting often upon unconsolidated sand and gravel, fell 

 within this category. That such could not have been brought into 

 their present position through floods was to him obvious, neither could 

 they have been floated by ice floes from the north during a period of 

 terrestrial depression. He assumed, rather, that the country previous 

 to what is now known as the glacial epoch was covered with enormous 

 lakes, and that a change in climate ensued, causing them to become 

 frozen and converted into immense glaciers. At the same time eleva- 

 tions and depressions of the earth's surface were in progress, giving 

 various degrees of inclination to the frozen surfaces of the lakes, down 

 which boulders, sand and gravel would be impelled to great distances 

 from the points of their origin. The impelling force, he thought, in 

 some cases might be gravity alone, but during the close of the epoch, 



