322 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the country, and losing themselves in the sea along the coast, while 

 they corrugate the borders of the innumerable bays, and the walls of 

 the deep fiords that indent the shores. These furrows can be traced 

 for miles across the country, cutting the three ranges that lie between 

 Bangor and the sea almost at right angles, traversing these highlands 

 as though they were level surfaces, dipping beneath the sea, and re- 

 appearing upon the sides of Mount Desert, to be again lost in the 

 waters of the Atlantic. Unquestionably, over that sea-floor, could we 

 follow their tracks, the same furrows continue to the "verge of the con- 

 tinent which lies miles out to seaward, when the steep edge of the 

 land falls precipitately to the true bottom of the ocean. Over the 

 West, throughout Canada, and upon the ancient rocks of the Great 

 Lakes, these evidences of past erosion exist upon an enormous scale. 

 As a rule, these striae indicate a planing surface advancing from the 

 north, and, though a second series may occur, as upon the islands of 

 Lake Erie, from east to west, whose furrows obliterate the first in- 

 scription, such phenomena are local merely, and infrequent. Again, 

 upon the Sierras, the tops and declivities of the ranges are scored and 

 engraved with the indelible signatures of past erosions, and the rocks 

 of the barren wastes of British America are. signalized in the same 

 manner. So much for strise : we perceive their universal presence, 

 and their marked reference to the north, or elevated regions which 

 dominate over level plains. 



The second feature of this epoch, designated by common consent 

 the Drift, is a series of surprising facts, evincing, throughout all this 

 deeply-scored and paneled country, the past presence of extraordinary 

 transporting agencies. We find rocks of enormous size, in some 

 instances weighing 3,000 tons, planted in fields and lowlands, or 

 strewed over hills and moors, where no rocks lie in place, sunken in 

 the soil where the lithology of the district is entirely distinct, 

 while that of the monoliths themselves is identical with rock many 

 miles northward. These gigantic bowlders, Titanic mementos of the 

 past, are scattered over Central Europe, over Germany, Holland, and 

 Russia, are identical in character, and can have no nearer origin than 

 in the mountains of Scandinavia. Some of these blocks of stone are 

 of incredible dimensions, and are accompanied by innumerable smaller 

 ones that lie over these districts as if flung in sport by some pre- 

 Adamite Antaeus. They have served the most useful purposes in the 

 flat countries through which they are found, being used for buildings 

 of every description, and their smallest associates have helped to 

 pave the highways between Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Breslau. Ac- 

 credited in ruder times to the malevolent agency of man's spiritual 

 foes, they were called devil-stones ; but Science, recognizing their dis- 

 tant origin, has named them erratics, and the Germans, more pictu- 

 resquely, wanderers. Not only are they found upon level and loamy 

 lands, utterly unaccountable except by the assumptions of transpor- 



