Lesley.] 194 [March. 



great valleys of the North with a great glacier of its own, naming 

 them the Penobscot Glacier, the Connecticut Glacier, the Hudson 

 Glacier, the Mohawk Glacier, the Susquehanna Glacier, &c. In view 

 of Kane and Hayes's discoveries of the present state of things in Green- 

 land, and for easy accounting not only for such groups of east and 

 west and north and south striae as appear at Cherry Valley, the Cats- 

 kill House, and Wilkesbarre, but also for those which cross the pol- 

 ished summits of our highest mountain tops, such as the Penobscot 

 Knob which looks down upon the valley of Wyoming, there is 

 not the same objection felt now as was at first expressed against the 

 Agassizan cope of ice for the hemisphere. President Hitchcock 

 finds its reliquial glaciers in the valleys of Hampshire and Berkshire, 

 and Professor Dana explains the absence of moraines now by the 

 absence of any aiguilles to overhang and shed their stone-slides upon 

 the back, or upon the edges of its subdivided streams. 



The thus admitted absence of moraines, and the excuse advanced 

 for it, return us unexpectedly to the starting-point of the discussion, 

 the question. Could ice have fashioned our topography? No one 

 doubts its ability to scratch and groove and polish. Can it excavate ? 

 And if it can, what is the limit of its excavating power? Leaving 

 the glacialists of the fixed-ice school and the floating-ice school to settle 

 between them the force, frequency, direction, and exact modus operandi 

 of striation, quite sure that they will at least agree on the date of the 

 phenomenon as very recent, we are left at liberty to revert to those 

 more remote days, when the broad-backed anticlinals rose into the 

 sky higher than any Alpine aiguilles or Andean volcanic cones; to 

 speculate on, 1, Whether they were unbroken vaults; or split along 

 their axes ; 2. If split, whether split completely down to water-level, 

 or how far; 3. Whether glaciers could have been then formed at all ; 

 4. Whether, if formed, they could excavate a valley five or ten miles 

 deep into the heart of an unbroken anticlinal; or 5, Do more than 

 polish the central gorge, if the anticlinal were broken ; 6. How such 

 a central glacier could escape from such a gorge sideways, or in any 

 direction but endwise, at the limits of the crack; or 7. Fail to leave 

 high walls, alpine ranges, peaks, aiguilles, and moraines behind it 

 when it disappeared. 



Surely the glacialist must startle back from such an incredible pic- 

 ture. The great obstacle in the way of topographical science among 

 geologists, has been an innocent ignorance of the titanic postulates 

 upon the ground ; and therefore, an inability to reconstruct in imagi- 

 nation the awful vaults of rock which have been removed from over 



