Price.] ■^42 [March .J, 17, & 



"We have tlic deepest interest, as a truth of seieiiee, to know what have l)ecn 

 the cuuyes that have deepl}' moditied the surface of the world Ave inhabit ; 

 and a yet deeper interest in knowing what shall befall that part of the 

 northern liemisphere now occupied by the most intelligent and civilized 

 portion of n\;inkind, with their wealth, cities, cultivation, and works of 

 transportation and travel ; for if the theory be true all these will be ground 

 into the comminution of the boulder clay that flows from beneath the 

 glacier of the Alps ! Wlien men pay for real estate they exact an extreme 

 scientific care that they get a fee simple title forever. Why be so anxious, 

 if all is to be razed, leaving them an interval of but a term of years. 

 Yet more ; we cannot but sympathize with a posterity destined so to perish ; 

 and with the sliock to the faitli of tliosc who believe in a Creator, capaWe, 

 and willing to conserve His creation. 



Let us then see wliat this supposed continental ice-sheet is. Listen tlien 

 to the verj' words of Agassiz, author of the theory : " It is a sheet of snow 

 ten cr fifteen thousand feet in thickness, extending all over the northern 

 and southern portions of the globe ; and must necessarily lead, in the end, 

 In the formation of a northern and southern cap of ice, moving to tlie 

 equator." Speaking of tlie northern, Agassiz further says: "As to tlie 

 southward movement of an immense field of ice, extending over the whole 

 north, it seems inevitable, the moment we admit that snow maj' accumulate 

 round the pole in such quantities as to initiate a pressure radiating in 

 every direction, " "alternately thawing and freezing, it must, like water, 

 find its level at last." "In the State of Maine, I have followed, compass in 

 hand, the same set of furrows, running from north to south in one iinvary- 

 iiig line over a surface of one hundred and thirty miles from the Katahdin 

 Iron Range to the shore. These furrows follow all the inequalities of the 

 country, ascending ranges of hills varjing from twelve to fifteen hundred feet 

 in height, and descending into the intervening valleys two or three hundred 

 f.'Ct above the sea, or sometimes even on a level with it." (A Journal to 

 Brazil, 408, 402.) These all are words of Agassiz, with no word ot' ap- 

 l)rohension or sympathy for his fellow beings, for whose welfare the noble 

 labors of his life were devoted. 



Agassiz gives further explanation of his views on the "Ice period in 

 America," in the Allnntic Monthly for July, 18G4. The ice moved over 

 the continent as one continuous sheet overriding nearly all the inequalities 

 of the surface,, p. 88. Fragments of rocks from Lake Superior are found 

 in New England, and northern rocks on the prairies of Illinois and Iowa, 

 down to the fortieth degree of latitude. Polished rocks and straight scratches 

 may be seen for hundreds and luuidreds of miles. The slopes of the AUeghenj'^ 

 range are glacier-worn to the very fop, with the exception of a few jtoints. 

 !Mount AVashingfon is over six thousand feet high and wears glacier marks 

 to near its summit. Here the thickness .1 the sheet could not have been 

 less than six thousand feet. If nuich lower than that the ice passed over 

 the mountains. He asks us to imagine the climate of Greenland brought 

 down to the fortieth degree of latitude, with ice thousands of feet thicker 



