444 H. S. Howorth — Elevation of American Cordillera. 



King's surveys is that comparatively only a very small portion of 

 the highest ranges of mountains has ever been covered with glaciers, 

 and that there has never been in this region anything like a northern 

 drift period or a transportation of material in any given direction 

 independent of the present topographical features of the country " 

 ("Nature,"1881, p. 290). 



Again, Mr. G. K. Gilbert, in his report on the geology of Nevada, 

 Utah and Arizona, says : 



"About White's Peak in the Schell Eange, Nevada, are the 

 terminal moraines of five or six glaciers that descended to 8000 feet 

 altitude in lat. 39° 15'. At about the same altitude and in lat. 39° 

 are moraines and an Alpine lake upon the flanks of Wheeler's Peak, 

 of the Snake Range of Nevada. Old Baldy Peak (N. lat. 38° 18'), 

 near Beaver, Utah, overlooks tviro terminal moraines, one of which 

 contains a lakelet at an altitude of about 9000 feet. No traces were 

 seen of a general glaciation such as the Northern States experienced, 

 and the cumulative negative evidence is of such weight that Mr. 

 Gilbert is of opinion that the glaciers of the region referred to were 

 confined to the higher mountain ridges " (" Nature," vol. xii. p. 299). 



I will quote one more witness, and he the most important, 

 because his remarks refer to the northern prolongation of the 

 Eocky Mountains in latitudes where we should expect to see glacial 

 phenomena on a very wide scale. 



Professor George Dawson, the distinguished son of a distinguished 

 father, has recently mapped out in detail the district threaded by 

 the more northern parts of the Eocky Mountains, and what do we 

 find on his map ? Why, that while on the west of the chain the 

 erratics, which were once shed by .the Cascade Eange, come almost 

 up to the Eocky Mountains on the one hand, and on the east the 

 drift, which has everywhere spread so far from Labrador and its 

 neighbourhood, has similarly travelled right up to the flanks of the 

 Cordillera, not an arrow or a mark is found on the map to show 

 that the Eockies themselves threw off anj' erratics of their own, or 

 that the great masses of ice which (one must suppose) covered them 

 in the Glacial age, if they were then existing, formed any barrier to 

 the spread of drift on either side of them. Assuredly the fact is 

 a very extraordinary one. 



North America presents to us the most gigantic traces of ice- 

 action to be found anywhere. Nowhere else are the polished and 

 striated surfaces so widespread, and the boulders and wreckage of 

 ice-action so conspicuous. East and west of the Eocky Mountains 

 the evidence is the same. How comes it, then, that the highest 

 ground of all, which would naturally be looked upon as the main 

 reservoir of the ice, should be so free from its marks, and should be 

 so sharply contrasted with the mountains of Scandinavia, with the 

 Alps, with the Cascade Eange, and with the gathering ground of 

 the Laurentian glacier? To my mind there is only one possible 

 explanation of the facts here mentioned, namely, that the great 

 American Cordillera, both in North and South America, is not only, 

 as Elie de Beaumont affirmed, one of the newest mountain ranges 



