34^ THE GREAT ICE AGE 



by old moraines at lower levels than those in process of 

 formation, were noted. Here was a modern cause capable of 

 explaining all the phenomena. Men's minds were taken by 

 storm, and as always happens in the case of new and im- 

 portant discoveries, the agency of glaciers was pushed at once 

 far beyond the possibilities of their action under any known 

 physical or climatal laws. This exaggerated idea of the 

 action of land ice in the form of glaciers is not yet exploded, 

 more especially in the United States, where official sanction 

 has been given to it by the Geological Survey, and where it 

 has been introduced even into school and college text books. 

 It affords also a telling bit of scientific sensationalism, which 

 can scarcely be resisted by a certain class of popular writers. 

 America has also afforded greater facilities for extreme theories 

 of this kind, owing to the wide and uninterrupted distribution 

 of glacial deposits, and the more simple and less broken 

 character of its great internal plateau, while the influence 

 of great leading minds, like those of the elder Agassiz and of 

 Dana, naturally held sway over the younger geologists. Fortu- 

 nately Canada, which possesses the larger and more northern 

 half of the North American continent; though numerically 

 inferior, and therefore overborne in the discussion, has, in 

 the main, remained stedfast to facts rather than to specious 

 theories, and has been confirmed in this position by the 

 clearer testimony of nature in a region where many of the 

 features of the glacial age still persist. ^ 



The writer of these pages has, ever since the publication of 

 the first edition of his " Acadian Geology," ^ steadily resisted 

 the more extreme views of glaciation, and has opposed the 

 southward progress of the great continental glacier. Though, 

 figuratively speaking, overborne "and pressed back in the 



1 I may refer here to the recent researches of Dr. G. M. Dawson, Mr. 

 R. Chalmers, Mr. McConnell and Dr. Ells. 



2 1855. 



