THE ICE-FIELD TO-DAY 17 



It was never the business of Glacialogists to 

 notice that under the inland ice and the great 

 lava floods of Greenland lie pressed magnolia 

 leaves in the high Arctic. These tell me of 

 cloudy skies saving the summer's warmth all 

 through the polar night, of a vast cloud sphere 

 sheltering the whole Earth from a sun much 

 hotter than we know to-day. The Ice Age to 

 me is an incident in that clearing of the skies 

 which dried the world-forest, made the grass 

 steppes and deserts, and evolved the horse. 



The Glacialogists make the Ice Age an 

 episode of the past. Without the sHghtest 

 relevance to any obhquity of the Orbit, or 

 vagaries of the Gulf Stream, the Ice-cap per- 

 sists to-day as a living fact. I have been 

 there, have seen it, and cannot be persuaded 

 otherwise. The forces which created the Ice- 

 cap are still at work, and as they merely 

 strengthen or relax, the Icefield grows or 

 shrinks. These forces made the Ice flood to 

 plough the fields and train the folk for seeding 

 a crop of human empires — British, American, 

 Russian, and German world-powers. The ice 

 which prepared town-sites for Moscow, Petro- 

 grad, Berlin, London, and New York, may 

 come again to sweep them all away. We are 

 not behaving ourselves so very nicely. 



