James Geikie — On Changes of Climate. 67 



"chains of sandhills" which he saw in several places stretching far 

 away on either side from the river valley. He tell& us that "the 

 ridges and cones of sand were not only of great height but singularly 

 crowned with immense boulders, grey with lichen-, which assuredly 

 would have been considered as having been placed by design, had 

 not the impossibility of moving such enormous masses proved in- 

 contestably that it was Nature's work." This was in 66°" N. lat. 

 In another place "the country was formed of gently undulating hills, 

 whose surfaces were covered with large fragments of rock and a 

 coarse gravelly soil."^ In the "barren grounds" to the west of the 

 bleak country traversed by Back sandhills and huge erratics are 

 equally abundant.* 



Thus in Northern America, as in the northern latitudes of Europe, 

 we find the ground covered throughout wide areas with groups of 

 kames, eskers, osar, ridges, mounds, or cones of sand and gravel ; 

 and these peculiar hillocks are everywhere dotted over with large 

 erratics in such a way as to show^that the sand and gravel m-ust have 

 been deposited and heaped up before the erratic blocks were dropped. 

 And, from the rare occurrence of boulders embedded in the sand and 

 gravel, it is only reasonable to infer that at the time the sand and 

 gravel were deposited there could not have been much ice floating 

 about. It is true that piles and mounds of coarse unstratified debris 

 and boulders are occasionally found associated with the re-assorted 

 drift; but these, according to Professor Agassiz and several other 

 American geologists, are moraines and not the droppings of icebergs. 

 The mounds of well water-worn sand and gravel are singularly free 

 of boulders, except on the outside. 



After wide-siDread accumulations of sand and gravel had gathered 

 upon the bed of the sea, the climate of the northern hemisphere, 

 which had been moderate during the period of subsidence, again 

 became cold. Fleets of icebergs and ice-rafts set sail from every 

 coast that remained above the sea,, and dropped their burdens as they 

 journeyed on. But the bed of the sea was now rising, and a great 

 number of old beaches mark out the successive pauses in the re- 

 elevation of the land. Professor Hitchcock describes many in his 

 paper already referred to. The highest beach he mentions is one in 

 the White Mountains, at a height of 2449 feet above the sea. An- 



1 Narrative of Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River, etc., 

 pp. 140, 346. I cannot refrain from quoting a passage which the geologist will at 

 once recognize as a faithful picture of a highly glaciated knd-surface. The scene 

 described by Back was just on the skirts of the barren grounds. " There was not the 

 stern beauty of Alpine scenery, and still less the fair variety of hill and dale, forest 

 and glade, which makes the charm of a European landscape. There was nothing to 

 catch or detain the lingering eye, which wandered on without a check over endless 

 lines of round-backed rocks, whose sides were rent into indescribably eccentric forms. 

 It was like a stormy ocean suddenly petrified. Except a few tawny and pale green 

 lichens there was nothing to relieve the horror of the scene ; for the fire had scathed 

 it, and the gray and black stems of the mountain pine which lay prostrate in mournful 

 confusion seemed like the blackened corpses of departed vegetation" (p. 178). 



2 See Sir J. Franklin's "First Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea;" and his. 

 " Second Journey ; " also Sir J. Richardson's " Journal of a Boat Voyage through 

 Rupert's Land." 



