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had been carried thither by a forward expansion of the gla- 
ciers of the Alps, invading, oversliding, and deeply burying 
the entire plains of Switzerland. Twenty years ago Mr. 
Agassiz, having previously shown the Scotch and Welsh 
geologists the traces of a similar universal glacier, which 
once descended from their highlands and covered all Great 
Britain, appeared upon this side of the Atlantic to establish 
among us the grand mythology of universal ice. From 
Halifax to the Fond-du-lac, and from the Ottawa to the 
Ohio, he found its vestiges. And now he covers with it the 
entire water-plains of the Amazons, the Orinoco, and the La 
Plata, from the shores of the Andes to the sea, six millions 
of square miles of the earth’s surface, a part of it directly 
under the equator and close upon the level of the sea. 
But we are concerned, not with the truth of these ideas, 
but only with their introduction into America, and their 
partial adoption by Edward Hitchcock, towards the close 
of his life. I say their partial adoption, for in the discus- 
sions which ensued he exhibited his usual mixture of con- 
servatism and love of new ideas. He was, as a man, both 
timid and adventurous. Adventurous and progressive where 
he thought he could see his way ; hesitating and submissive 
to authority when himself in the dark. And this composi- 
tion of adverse habits, held in balance by circumstances, not 
by will nor by genius, made him a representative man,— a 
geologist in whose writings one can read the halting progress 
of American Geology, — its ignorance of its own past history, 
its premature intuitions, its ill-bred waywardness and levity, 
its abortive investigations, its double-minded instability, its 
feeble conservatism, its energetic radicalism, the fertility of 
‘its fancy, and the haziness of its judgment, its patience to 
wait, and its power to work, for what it is as ready to abandon 
o a moment for something new. 
