Balanced Rock, in the Garden of the 

 Gods, Is So Perfectly Poised That 

 Formerly Two People Could Sway It. 

 Now It Is Cemented Firmly in Place 





M 



Rocking Stones and 

 Their Romantic Story 



IN some of tlie accompanying photo- 

 graphs arc to be seen three different 

 kinds of rocks, perclied by Nature one 

 on top of another. How could they 

 have been placed in such positions? 

 They weigh many tons. 



Millions of years before the coming of 

 the first man on the earth, the two top 

 detached boulders were gently placed in 

 their present resting places by the liand 

 of a veritable giant — the North American 

 glacier. During the (ircat Ice Age the 

 ■whole of the northern jiortion of the 

 United States was covered hundreds of 

 feet deep with glacial ice. A glacier is 

 snow, which, by melting and intense 

 packing, is formed into solid ice banks. 

 But the glacier is a constanth' mo\ing 

 ice mass. It trav'els slowK- but wiili 

 enormous grinding and carrying power, 

 down the slopes and valleys. 



A mass of ice se\'eral hundred feet thick, 

 constantly replenished at its source, and 

 sliding down a mountain slope with a 

 weight of many tons to the square foot 

 must have been well-nigh irresistible. 

 That such was the case is illustrated by 

 the many enormous boulders which were 

 picked up from their original moorings 

 by the huge glaciers of the Ice Age and 

 transported many miles before they 

 were deposited by the melting of the ice. 



Without this now well established 



explanation of glacial transportation it 

 would be impossible to account for the 

 queer i)ositions in which boulders are 

 often found as well as for the inter- 

 mingling of entirely different kinds of 

 rocks in the same place. 



In one of the photographs the upper 

 boulder is a rock about fi\e b>' eight by 

 eight feet, of coarse Massachusetts 

 granite. It is securely perched on a 

 different kind of rock of nearly the same 

 size — a rock known as a gneiss. Both 

 are resting on a granite ledge, but of a 

 different texture from that of the upper 

 granite rock. Even assuming that the 

 two granite rocks were alike, without 

 knowledge of glacial action, it would be 

 difticult to account for the presence of 

 tlie middle boulder weighing at least 

 ten tons. 



Nowhere in the I'nited States are the 

 evidences of the tremendous force of 

 the great glaciers of the Ice Age more 

 striking than in the Sierra Nevada 

 of California. Rugged \'-shaped moun- 

 tain gorges have been scoured and 

 smoothed out into broad I'-shaped 

 \alle\s by the great descending ice 

 masses. The dirt and rocks have been 

 spread about on the plains below or at 

 the mouths of the canyons, while the 

 glacial scratches and furrows can be 

 plainly seen on the remaining rocks in 



413 



