THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 



not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light 

 of common day on the hill above Slabsides, with the 

 waters of the Hudson glistening below, and the trees 

 rustling in the wind all about us, that is quite an- 

 other matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable. 

 Many of the processes that have made our globe 

 what we see it have been so slow and on such a scale 

 that they are quite beyond our horizon — beyond 

 the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind 

 has to approach them slowly and tentatively, and 

 become familiar with the idea of them, before it can 

 give any sort of rational assent to them. It has 

 taken the geologist a long time to work out and 

 clear up and confirm this conception of the great 

 continental glacier which in Pleistocene times cov- 

 ered so large a part of the northern hemisphere. 

 It is now as well established as any event in the re- 

 mote past well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss 

 Alps, one may see the ice doing exactly what the 

 Pleistocene ice-sheet did over this country\ 



II 



The other day in passing a farmer's house I saw 

 where he had placed a huge, roundish boulder, 

 nearly as high as a man's head, by the roadside and 

 had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of 

 his father before him, and that of the first settler 

 upon the farm, in the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century. It was an interesting monument. I 



163 



