Price.] -^ < ^ [March 3, 17, & 



of the Alps it must rest upon an inclined plane of four and a half degrees de- 

 scent ; or liave such an elevation at tlie pole in its own thickness as to be 

 equivalent to that inclination ; and that would require a height of ice at 

 the pole of two hundred and seventy-one miles, that the sheet might reach 

 the fortieth degree of latitude. The statement of such requisition seems 

 sufficiently condemnatory of the theory. 



There are laws of limitations ever ruling all nature, including the 

 powers of the air. These all have their boundaries they may not pass ; 

 their effects cannot transcend their limited cause. When we consider and 

 perceive that no glacier or polar ice-sheet can be formed without snow, we 

 must also perceive that the quantity of snow must find a limit in the heat 

 that evaporates the water into the air that shall fall as snow. Create the Arc- 

 tic climate over the world, that is requisite to maintain the supposed great 

 ice-sheet unmelted, and you cut off the amount of evaporation necessary to 

 form and preserve that ice sheet. You have thereby made it an impossibility. 

 To diminish the Sun's heat is to cut oft' the supply of snow to build the 

 great glacier. Tyndall on Heat, 206. "We cannot afford to lose an iota of 

 solar action ; we need, if anything more vapour ; but we need a condenser 

 so powerful that this vapour, instead of falling in liquid showers to the 

 earth, shall be so far reduced in temperature as to fall in snow." lb. 207. 

 That condenser must be the mountaim, or be the polar cold. But the sup- 

 ply of heat from the Sun is ever a constant quantity. " This expenditure, 

 (of the Sun) has been going on for ages, without our being able, in historic 

 times, to detect the loss." lb. 434. It is a supply ever dispensed ; never 

 spent, never varied ; and will not permit the growth of the great ice-sheet. 

 Less heat would make less snow, and snow must make the ice-sheet or 

 glacier. 



The theory supposes the ice-sheet to reach below the 40th degree of lati- 

 tude ; and the cold intlueuces of that would e.\tend over the world. There 

 would not only be a failure of evaporation to fall as snow to maintain the 

 ice-sheet ; but the snow formed could never reach the pole, or approximate it, 

 to form the head and jiressure to drive southward the continental 

 glacier The evaporated moisture of the tropics would be precii)ilatod in 

 snow as soon as chilled at the freezing point first reached ; that is, as soon, 

 at least, as it reached the ice-sheet. We find such to be the law of snow 

 ])r('cipitaf ion on the highest mountains. " According to Tschudi the quan- 

 tity of snow whicii falls upon that portion of the Alps which is above 10,- 

 800 feet is comparatively very small. Most of the clouds charged with 

 snow flakes discharge their burden on the mountain slopes at elevations of 

 7,000 to 8,000 feet." The Earth ; by Elisee Redus, 103. Mountains in 

 Thibet 20,000 feet in height are therefore found denuded of every particle 

 of snow, because the dry winds there have not the moisture to dispense in 

 snow ; and for the same reason the north side of the Himalayas have the 

 lower snow line higher than that on their south side, where the heat is 

 greater and the moisture more abundant. lb. Ifio-G. Hence also there is an 

 upper, as well as a lower snow line on very high mountains. Speaking of 



