﻿114 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59. 



to two miles in thickness, freed all the continent as far down as the 

 southern border of New England from an enormous weight and chill. 

 Forthwith the elasticity of the strata began lifting them slowly behind 

 it, and the movement continues still in a great slow wave, even after 

 the lapse of some thousands of years. 



Prof. Packard x long ago quoted a previous observer as to the 

 uplifting of the Labrador coast, adding his own testimony. Prof. 

 McGee, whom I have consulted, puts the neutral point where there 

 is neither ascent nor descent, on the Gulf of Maine, north of Boston, 

 perhaps not far from the New Hampshire line, but the recent investi- 

 gations of Mr. Davis 2 carry it somewhat farther north. All above 

 rises ; below it is the resulting depression or trough of the earth wave, 

 gradually lessening in downward movement. Apparently the earth 

 crust behaves like a blanket undulated. Professor Brown of 

 Brown's University writes that five hundred feet of uplift in all are 

 reported from Labrador, and nearly seven hundred from parts of the 

 Hudson Bay region. Prof. Shaler 3 has elaborately explained this de- 

 pression and re-elevation. Mr. Davis's marsh investigations add 

 another proof of the movement by demonstrating the complementary 

 recent sinking below. The recent work on Labrador, the Country and 

 the People, by W. T. Grenfell and others contains on page 118 a 

 map giving the figures of uplift since the glacial era at various points 

 of the Newfoundland and Labrador front, making 575 feet at St. 

 Johns the maximum. Pages 127-135, etc., of this section, by R. A. 

 Daly, add further discussion of this phenomenon and the general 

 testimony of residents of the coast to its continuance. 



Even these results would have seemed inadequate while men held 

 by the prodigious periods of the astronomical glacial theories. But 

 the observations of Shaler at Niagara, and of other investigators, 

 all the way from the northwest to the Atlantic ocean, have built up a 



1 A. S. Packard: The Labrador Coast. 



2 C. A. Davis : Salt Marsh Formation. Economic Geology, vol. 5, no. 7 (1910) . 

 3 N. S. Shaler: Nature and Man in America, p. 96 and context ; also his 



Aspects of the Earth, pp. 2, 3, 6, 7, "As when a glacial sheet is imposed on a 

 continent — as it was in the immediate past in North America — a wide area of 

 the ice-laden land sank beneath the sea ; to recover its level when the depres- 

 sing burden was removed." Cf. A. R. Wallace: The Geographical Distribu- 

 tion of Animals, vol. 1, p. 152 — "the weight of ice piled up in the north would 

 cause the land surface to sink there, perhaps unequally, owing to the varying 

 nature of the interior crust of the earth; and since the weight has been re- 

 moved land would rise again still somewhat irregularly, and thus the phenomena 

 of raised beaches of arctic shells in temperate latitudes are explained." 



