A GOLD MINE. 67 



paratively fresh and new. It is the scattered 

 debris of the great Ice Age, that closed some- 

 where within one hundred thousand years, 

 reasoning from many data. When that reign 

 of cold prevailed a body of snow, compressed 

 into ice several thousand feet in thickness, 

 covered all the northern portion of North 

 America, and this locality was included. This 

 ice sheet or glacier moved very slowly a few 

 inches in a day in a southeasterly direction 

 to the ocean. It was continually fed by snows. 

 In this movement over the naked rocks it car- 

 ried along fragments of them, frozen in its 

 embrace, and broke off and pushed forward the 

 more exposed projecting veins and ledges. Al- 

 though no historian of that time wrote this 

 down in a book for us to consult, still Nature 

 herself made a record, readily interpreted and 

 destined to outlast mankind and all his works. 

 The proof is very simple. Let me illustrate: 

 If any one of us had ever seen and carefully 

 observed a bear and his tracks, and afterwards 

 went into another country and saw bear tracks 

 about the woods, he would know the animal 

 had been where he made and left the impres- 

 sions of his feet. Now there are immense 

 glaciers in Greenland, Alaska and other Polar 

 regions. Of smaller dimensions they are found 



