MY FARTHEST NORTH 239 



Imagine a region of low archaean hills, extending 

 one thousand miles each way, subjected for thousands 

 of years to a continual succession of glaciers, crushing, 

 grinding, planing, smoothing, ripping up and smooth- 

 ing again, carrying off whole ranges of broken hills, in 

 fragments, to dump them at some other point, grind 

 them again while there, and then push and hustle them 

 out of that region into some other a few hundred miles 

 farther; there again to tumble and grind them to- 

 gether, pack them into the hollows, and dump them in 

 pyramidal piles on plains and uplands. Imagine this 

 going on for thousands of years, and we shall have the 

 hills lowered and polished, the valleys more or less 

 filled with broken rocks. 



Now the glacial action is succeeded by a time of 

 flood. For another age all is below water, dammed by 

 the northern ice, and icebergs breaking from the pa- 

 rent sheet carry bedded in them countless boulders, 

 with which they go travelling south on the open waters. 

 As they melt the boulders are dropped; hill and hollow 

 share equally in this age-long shower of erratics. Nor 

 does it cease till the progress of the warmer day re- 

 moves the northern ice-dam, sets free the flood, and 

 the region of archaean rocks stands bare and dry. 



It must have been a dreary spectacle at that time, 

 low, bare hills of gneiss, granite, etc. ; low valleys half- 

 filled with broken rock and over everything a sprin- 

 kling of erratic boulders ; no living thing in sight, noth- 

 ing green, nothing growing, nothing but evidence of 

 mighty power used only to destroy. A waste of shat- 

 tered granite spotted with hundreds of lakes, thou- 



