Aprils, 1876.] '^^* [Price. 



259. This statement is refreshing for its moderation and good sense. The 

 isolation circumscribed the phenomena and forbade extraneous speculations. 



Yet it is believed, that if we do look into general causes, and consider 

 them well, we shall find that the forces of nature are so well balanced, that 

 the imagined continental polar-ice sheet must be regarded as an impossi- 

 bility; shall find that we need not raise mountains at the poles, against the 

 effect of the force of the Earth's rotation, to slide down the ice; nor to sub- ' 

 merge mountains and continents once elevated from the sea, again and 

 again, to account for marine remains, or ice scratches upon the rocks, left 

 there as they first emerged from the waters. 



The theory of a north polar ice cap, spreading as a garment to the tropics, 

 or to the fortieth degree of latitude only, seems not to have sufficiently con- 

 sidered the nature of the Arctic ice and climate. I open Dr. Kane's second 

 Grinnell Expedition, and find that it wintered in Smith's Straits, latitude 

 78|^o. In January the thermometer ranged from 64^* to 75© below zero, 

 Vol. 1, p. 154; from March 10th to 14th, the average was 46^ below zero. 

 " The intense cold approximates all ice to granite. " Vol. I, p. 184. Look 

 at the pictures; the ice is as hard and sharp of outline as unworn rocks, 

 p. 162. The glacier that has shed its iceberg presents a vertical front; The 

 ice-belt between the " fioe " and the land, is "24 feet in thickness, 65 in 

 mean width; the second, or appended ice 38 feet wide; and the third 34 feet. 

 All three are ridges of immense ice-tables, serried like the granite blocks 

 of a rampart, and investing the rocks with a triple circumvallation." lb. 

 p. 162. 



Dr. Newberry, 2 Ohio Rep. 70, cites Dr. Kane's account of a sheet of 

 ice, eight feet thick, resting on supports twenty feet apart, as having 

 swagged five feet midway of the supports, while the weather was far below 

 freezing point, to prove that the polar ice sheet could flow southward. To 

 one not wedded to that glacial theory the evidence does not seem so strong. 

 "With the weight of its own bulk on the centre of a span of twenty feet, we 

 might believe there was a perpendicular pressure much more than propor- 

 tionable to the force that propels the Alpine glacier. Yet in several months 

 the strain caused no fracture of the ice; no fluxion of particles to change its 

 form ; but all except the bend remained of the some shape, and sharp of 

 outline. If it had rested on a plane of the inclination of the bed of the 

 Alpine glacier, there is no indication that its mass or particles would have 

 moved a hair's breadth. It will here not be forgotten that a polar ice-sheet 

 to be thousands of feet thick in New England must be of growing thickness 

 all the way to the pole, and that the intensity'of cold for all that distance 

 must have been greater than any Arctic cold known to us, and have held 

 the ice formed in the water as firm as granite, and impervious to any heat 

 that could reach it. 



As to the snow that should fall upon land at a period of intense and long 

 continued cold as supposed, it would not form into ice, or make the theo- 

 retical continental glacier. To make the ice of the moving glacier, there 

 must be a back pressure from a greater elevation, and an alternation of heat 



