278 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



committee to draft and present to the sev- 

 eral governments wiihin a year a series of 

 propositions for expediting the adoption of 

 cremation. A third furnace for cremation 

 has been built at Woking, England, but has 

 not been used. The society having charge 

 of it, although it is assured by the Govern- 

 ment that the execution of its purposes will 

 not be interfered with by the law, is seeking 

 to obtain an express sanction of them from 

 the Government, with the expectation that 

 a measure recognizing cremations properly 

 performed with an efficient apparatus will 

 impose restrictions against the irregularities 

 of indiscriminate cremations, and against 

 the use of defective apparatus. 



Glacial Action in the Yellowstone Val- 

 ley. Mr. William H. Holmes has furnished 

 the "American Naturalist," from the un- 

 pubhshed report of the Government sur- 

 vey, an account of the glacial phenomena 

 in the Yellowstone Park, which are mani- 

 fested in a variety of forms, chiefly in er- 

 ratic rocks scattered everywhere, and in the 

 glaciation of rocks in situ in the narrow 

 gorges. It is not always safe to assume 

 that the presence of a bowlder in a particu- 

 lar spot indicates the former existence of a 

 glacier there, for the rock may have been 

 carried to a considerable distance by a force- 

 torrent or by a gradual, creeping movement 

 caused by the undermining of the soil un- 

 derneath ; nevertheless, we have every rea- 

 son to believe that glaciers formerly existed 

 in the park on a very extensive scale. Gla- 

 cial moraines are curiously absent from the 

 region ; and the tens of thousands of bowl- 

 ders that dot both sides of the Yellowstone 

 Valley generally lie on the smooth surface 

 of the flood-planes of the river, or on low 

 ridges of alluvial drift. " The significance 

 of this fact may be that the transporting 

 glaciers existed in the earlier stages of the 

 erosion of the valley, and that the morainal 

 ridges have been destroyed by the river, as 

 it oscillated from side to side in the suc- 

 ceeding stages of its descent from the pla- 

 teau-level to its present bed. These great 

 bowlders would, in such a case, be the more 

 durable masses of the moraines stranded on 

 the various flood-planes for want of water- 

 power to transport them." In seeking for 

 th source of the granite bowlders, it is ob- 



served that they occur to a great extent on 

 the south side of the valley, and at all ele- 

 vations, while the only bodies of similar rock 

 within the valley are found either on the 

 north side or on the bottom at no consider- 

 able elevation above the level of the river. 

 Either, then, the bowlders must have been 

 transported to their present positions be- 

 fore the valley existed, or the ice-streams 

 must have been so deep as to fill the valley 

 to the brim and thus carry and strand them. 

 In the latter case, if the glacier followed 

 the course of the valley, the bowlders must 

 have crossed the whole width of it after the 

 manner of a ferry. " This could really oc- 

 cur only in case there should be such an in- 

 crease in the masses of ice descending from 

 the highlands to the north as to completely 

 fill the valley, sweep across its course and 

 overspread the broad table-land to the 

 south." This table-land, the park plateau, 

 is wholly volcanic, extends for a hundred 

 miles to the south, and is separated from 

 the base of the granite highlands on the 

 north by the valley of the Yellowstone prop- 

 er and by the East Fork. A great bowlder 

 more than two thousand cubic feet in size 

 which was noticed near the brink of the 

 caiion, and a mile and a half below the 

 great falls, must have come either from the 

 granite highland north of the valley, in 

 which case it must have crossed the valley 

 of the East Fork and the third caiion, and 

 ascended the river for twenty miles, avoid- 

 ing Amethyst Mountain and the Washburn 

 I range by a circuitous route, or, less probably, 

 from the Gallatin Mountains, also twenty 

 miles away, when it must have had to cross 

 the valley of the Upper Gardiner Iviver and 

 the spurs of the Washburn Mountain. If 

 it be admitted, as all the evidence seems to 

 indicate, that the ice-rivers bringing down 

 the erratic blocks of granite came from the 

 north, " it becomes at once clear that the 

 erosion of the grand canon has been ac- 

 complished since the close of the glacial 

 period, or at least that a second erosion has 

 taken place if a canon existed prior to the 

 glacial epoch." 



Refrij^cration and Animal Heat. Dr. 



Paul Delmas, of Bordeaux, has published 

 the results of some experiments in refriger- 

 ating a healthy person by exposing him, du^ 



