THE ICE AGE. loi 



away in trains of icebergs, over whose sides pour streams of water, to 

 be lost in cavities, wbile torrents gush down their faces, sculpturing 

 the ice with the facile mimicry of towers, minarets, and spires. Bowl- 

 ders polished and channeled rocks, submarine moraines, abraded and 

 excavated chffs, are met with everywhere, and Kane counted forty-one 

 ledo-es, old beaches marking the recession of the sea, which in their 

 succession led from the granitic nucleus, formerly the coast-wall, to 

 the present shore-all typical features of the landscape where glaciers 

 and ice-caps are no longer found. The scenic effects in Greenland are 

 wonderful in the extreme. Appalling cliffs rise in barren and frigid 

 splendor from the broken floors of hummocks, and the peripheral ice- 

 foot- their summits, corroded by frost, discharge bowlders and dehns 

 upon the ice beneath, while icebergs in towering and fantastic glory, 

 crowd the shallowing bays, or press along the coast in weird processions, 

 marshaled by the shriek of the cracking floes, the crush of their own 

 dismantled pinnacles, or the thunder of distant avalanches. 



Ao-ain, turning our eyes to warmer latitudes, let us direct our ex- 

 plorations to New Zealand, and learn the corroborative testimony it 

 offers for this great theory. On the South Islands of New Zealand gla- 

 ciers rest among the high recesses of its western mountains, upon Mount 

 Cook, Mount f asman, and neighboring summits, while a glacier from 

 Mount Tyndall, at an elevation of 4,000 feet, gives birth to the river 

 Clyde, where its abrupt termination rears an icy wall 1,300 feet long and 

 120 feet high. The Francis Joseph Glacier from Mount Tasman de- 

 scends to within 705 feet of the sea-level, exhibiting the characteristics 

 of all known glaciers. These massive streams are carving with remorse- 

 less energy the solid rocks, and transporting in their course the trophies 

 of their labor. Yet, strong and magnificent as they now appear, they are 

 but the ghosts of those former seas which swept from peak to wave, 

 and piled upon the flanks of the mountains and the depressions of the 

 coast the huge moraines and the transported bowlders which appear on 

 every hand. These heaps of debris and congeries of rocky fragments 

 lie in the direct extension of the present glaciers, and indicate most 

 strikingly their origin. Lake-basins and narrow fiords created by the 

 erosion of prehistoric ice are universal ; and Lake Wakatipu, by the 

 most indisputable proofs, has been thus dug out of the living rock— 

 1,400 feet deep— itself but the shrunken outline of a previous sheet of 

 water that reached into the rock-worn valley below it. Even now the 

 glaciers of J^Iount Carnslaw, the brief remains of former arctic glories, 

 now retreated beyond the thermal influences of the lowland, emit two 

 rattling streams, turbid with the ground powder of the rocks, which, de- 

 positing their silt at the upper extremity of Lake Wakatipu, are ob- 

 literating in made land the testimony of past ravages. 



Passfng in one broad stride to the opposite, the eastern margins 

 of the Pacific, we find amid the savage and inhospitable Cordilleras of 

 Patao-onia new glaciers, and around and beneath them memorials of a 



