April 3, I8T6,] 253 [Price. 



Let us proceed to examine other witnesses for additional facts, and com- 

 pare other opinions of the scientific experts, though it be to find them ex- 

 pressing conflicting views, as they are wont to do in courts of justice, 

 when it becomes llie duty of the judge to extract the truth as well as he 

 can, by principles of reason applied by good sense. The testimony will 

 keep in view not only the facts of glaciation, but also those which show 

 that there were other causes for all the phenomena we witness less abnor- 

 mal than that assigned by the eminent naturalist whose name gave authority 

 to all his utterances. If a continental ice-sheet of the magnitude supposed 

 could not travel hither from the North Pole by land, there may have been 

 water-ways for ice to float down from the Arctic region, and also local 

 glaciers from higher mountains where none are now to be found, or those 

 of mucli smaller size. 



If the glaciation was cosmic, polar and continental, then should Northern 

 Asia bear evidence of it. James Geiliie claims to include North America, 

 but does not claim Siberia as having been subject to the reign of ice. He 

 says : "Thus, in the Western as in the Eastern Hemisphere, we are con- 

 fronted with precisely the same phenomena. In regions which can be proved 

 never to have been over-ridden by the great continental glaciers, and in 

 districts which give no evidence of submergence during the latest period 

 of glacial cold, the extinct mammalia occur in less or greater abundance at 

 the very surface." Great Ice Age, 501. He further says the north coast 

 of Asia "indicates the former presence of a milder climate in Siberia than 

 now," "in the presence of numerous animal remains," as of the "mam- 

 moth, wooly rhinoceros, bison and horse." p. 495, 496. "The great plains 

 of Siberia never could have nourished glaciers." "The absence of high 

 grounds, and the comparative dryness of the climate, must have prevented 

 any accumulation of glacier ice." 502. And he only claims that the great 

 glaciers extended southward to the middle of England. Yet to fill the con- 

 ception of Agassiz and CroU the ice formation at the Nortli Pole should 

 have so filled the Arctic Ocean as to move by its weight over the land of 

 Northern Asia, as well as over Europe and America. The land journey 

 should have been the same over the three continents from the same moun- 

 tain of ice at the North Pole. 



Next to the boulder clay, the scratches and groovings in the rocks are 

 taken as the proofs of the Polar ice-sheet. Their straight northerly direc- 

 tion affords the argument. 



Dr. Dawson, an eminent practical geologist, who has observed by travel 

 and reflected much upon the subject, rejects the theory of the great ice- 

 sheet from the far north. The scratchings are not from one direction, but 

 some from nearly north, some from north 20° and 30° east, north 20°, 25°, 

 SOOand 65° west. Acadian Geo. 62; 69. In the St. Lawrence Valley 

 the direction is from northeast to southwest. At Stony Point, Lake Erie, 

 Michigan, the grooves are from north 60^^ east, and from north 60° west. 

 Winchell, 218. Dana gives greater variations, showing variations and 

 hitches in the moving mass. 539, 751. And Henry D. Rogers said, the 



