"The Home I Found in Alaska 



The canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, etc., 

 are subordinate to the same glacial conditions in their 

 forms, trends, and extent as those which determined 

 the forms, trends, and distribution of the land-masses, 

 their basins being the parts of the pre-glacial margin 

 of the continent, eroded to varying depths below sea- 

 level, and into which, of course, the ocean waters 

 flowed as the ice was melted out of them. Had the 

 general glacial denudation been much less, these ocean 

 ways over which we are sailing would have been val- 

 leys and caiions and lakes; and the islands rounded 

 hills and ridges, landscapes with undulating features 

 like those found above sea-level wherever the rocks 

 and glacial conditions are similar. In general, the 

 island-bound channels are like rivers, not only in 

 separate reaches as seen from the deck of a vessel, 

 but continuously so for hundreds of miles in the case 

 of the longest of them. The tide-currents, the fresh 

 driftwood, the inflowing streams, and the luxuriant 

 foliage of the out-leaning trees on the shores make 

 this resemblance all the more complete. The largest 

 islands look like part of the mainland in any view to be 

 had of them from the ship, but far the greater number 

 are small, and appreciable as islands, scores of them 

 being less than a mile long. These the eye easily 

 takes in and revels in their beauty with ever fresh de- 

 light. In their relations to each other the individual 

 members of a group have evidently been derived from 

 the same general rock-mass, yet they never seem 

 broken or abridged in any way as to their contour 

 lines, however abruptly they may dip their sides. 



[ 17] 



