April 3, 1876.] ^ ^ ^ [Price. 



Mer de Glace and the Mer d'Aletsch, Reclus says, " It is a very remarkable 

 fact, in regard to both these glaciers, hnd those of the Himalaya, that the 

 iee-rivers are mucli longer and more abundant on the southern side of the 

 mountain than on the colder slopes which are turned to the north. This 

 phenomenon must evidently be attributed to the lai'ger quantity of snow 

 brought by the south wind, and impeded in its course by the lofty moun- 

 tains. " lb. 211-3. Thus the most snow comes from the side where there 

 is the geatest heat for evaporation. 



Dr. Hector shows that the same phenomenon takes place in New Zealand 

 as in the Himalaya and other mountains; namely that the snow fall is greatest 

 to the windward, whenever the temperature is at freezing point : " Much 

 of this enormous precipitation is deposited as snow in the Southern Alps, 

 which comb out the moisture from the westerly winds ; hence the exten- 

 sive glaciers of tlie mountain region and the comparative dryness of the 

 Canterbury Plains." Nature, Jan. 27, 1876, p. 259. 



As the climate of the world now is, the greatest quantity of snow does not 

 approximate the pole, though it will last longest there. It is more abundant 

 below than above the fiftieth degree of latitude. In British America, 

 above that degree six days of snow in a winter, and a depth of three and a 

 half feet, are normal quantities. 9 New Am. Cy., 337. With an ice sheet 

 down to 40 degrees of latitude the deepest snow would probably be mid- 

 way between the equator and pole. 



There is, therefore, no cause of the continental polar ice-sheet found in 

 the air; nor is there any ettect of it seen under the earth, where the effects 

 should have been often seen, if it proceeded from a planetary cause, for 

 then it should have been of periodical occurrence, and the efl:ect have been 

 seen in fossils in the rocks. Since land first peered above the waters to yield 

 disintegrated material for the deposit of the sedimentary strata, the rocks 

 have kept the registry of every species of plant and animal, and thus re- 

 corded the temperature of the globe, and told us that the time was when 

 tropical plants grew on the shores of Greenland. There, on the east coast 

 are the Carboniferous slates and coal, and on the west side of the Island of 

 Disco, at latitude over 69°, are impressions of the rankly growing vegeta- 

 tion of the tropics. The succession of stratified rocks, as arranged by Lyell 

 in his table in their order of deposition, number thirty-eight, 1 vol. 135, 

 commencing at some period of that long "beginning," when the earth 

 was first in preparation for man's inhabitancy. No stratum of all those 

 rocks tells of an ancient glacial period, while they all proclaim that the 

 Earth was a constantly cooling sphere, that it might become fitted for the 

 home of human beings. This process of cooling must have followed that 

 uniformly diminisliing rate with which a hotter body radiates its heat into 

 space, with the local exceptions made by mountain elevations, the distances 

 of the poles from the Sun's direct rays and by ice-bearing ocean currents. 

 And certainly the Sun lias in no period of the past dispensed less heat to 

 the Earth than now. If there be any fact on, or within the Earth, or 

 without it, to prove the contrary of such inductions from normal causes, it 



