126 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



active operation, only to a much greater extent. All upland Greenland is one vast mer 

 de glace. But the Greenland glaciers, instead of melting in intermediate sunny valleys, 

 push down into the sea itself, and after crawling along its bottom in the indenting bays 

 and fiords, keep breaking off great masses, which float away in the deejj blue waters 

 until they are caught by wind currents and gulf streams, to be borne by them as ice- 

 bergs and ice floes, whither the drift ot the ocean carries them . And thus they float, 

 until warmer seas cause them to melt in sunnier climes, and the floor of the ocean is 

 strewn with their adhering dii't and stones. Certain iceberg paths in the sea already 

 are accumulating at the bottom of the w^aters fields of boulders and huge windrows 

 and beds of gravel and dirt. Bafliu's Bay, Hiidson's Bay, and other northern seas and 

 bays thus become nests of icebergs, and these icebergs, before reaching the water, were 

 glaciers, and these glaciers, at their origin, were the Arctic snows of Greenland. Thus 

 Greenland, like all other polar and circumpolar lands, is shipping her boulders and her 

 gravel to the bottom of distant oceans, and these, at some time in the future eternities 

 of God, will become the face of continents. 



And now you w^ill indulge me a moment to paint a fancy sketch of that scene in that 

 world of savage desolation, home of the glacier, and realm of enduring fi'osti We 

 will take our stand on some headland of Spitzbergcu, or on some flame colored granite 

 ledge amidst the wild desolations of some Arctic waste of snow and ice. Before us is 

 the deep indenting fiord of some pulsating bay, throbbing responsive to the tides of the 

 ocean. Around us are the crawling glaciers creeping do\^n from the ice seas above. 

 As the ends become submerged and break ofl', the deep fiord, nest of the icebergs, 

 becomes filled with the slow moving bergs. Some are wallowing in the blue waters 

 like huge Leviathans; some impinge upon each other with the resounding crash of 

 parks of artillery, but the most of them shoot up their tall pinnacles into the thin, cold 

 air, presenting the similitudes of ice forests, or the more beautiful and artistic forms of 

 domes and minarets, and beetling pinnacles of a now departed medieval architecture. 

 The midnight arctic sun hangs in the heavens like a ball of fire, and his golden rays, 

 playing upon these icy masses, lights them up with flame, and emerald and blue, until 

 the whole watery realm glows with amethystine tints and opalescent hues, and the 

 refracted and reflected glory of a thousand rainbows plays around and among and over 

 the scene. Imagination may well revel in a glory like this, and the Beautiful Land, 

 with its flaming city, seen in glimpses by the pilgrim Bunyan over among the Delec- 

 able Mountains, comes softly to the mind like the shadow of a dream. Oh! we may 

 dream of our castles in the air, and build beautiful as we will, but Nature furnishes 

 grander scenes than any the imagination can picture, and there is no beauty or sublim- 

 ity like that in the great Land of Silence round the Poles. 



But we will come down from the ' ' misty mountain tops ' ' to the prairies of Illinois. 

 Starting with the boulders in the neighborhood of Lake Superior, we trace them south 

 and west to the Missouri river. These crystaline sandstones, flame colored granites 

 and black-trap rocks, can be traced back to their parent ledges about the starting point. 

 As we advance away from the pai-ent ledges, the bouldei's become smaller, and the 

 drift materials towards the Missouri river are only gravels and drift clays. On seeing 

 these curious water-worn stones strewn over the face of the country, the most ordinary 

 mind at once concludes that they did not grow there, but were brought there from 

 some other place. They are "nigger heads," "lost rocks ," wanderers away from 

 where they originally existed. They are entirely unlike any rocks outcropping round 



