THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 
not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light 
of common day on the hill above Slabsides, with the 
waters of the Hudson glistening below, and the trees 
rustling in the wind all about us, that is quite an- 
other matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable. 
Many of the processes that have made our globe 
what we see it have been so slowand on such a scale 
that they are quite beyond our horizon — beyond 
the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind 
has to approach them slowly and tentatively, and 
become familiar with the idea of them, before it can 
give any sort of rational assent to them. It has 
taken the geologist a long time to work out and 
clear up and confirm this conception of the great 
continental glacier which in Pleistocene times cov- 
ered so large a part of the northern hemisphere. 
It is now as well established as any event in the re- 
mote past well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss 
Alps, one may see the ice doing exactly what the 
Pleistocene ice-sheet did over this country. 
IT 
The other day in passing a farmer’s house I saw 
where he had placed a huge, roundish boulder, 
nearly as high as a man’s head, by the roadside and 
had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of 
his father before him, and that of the first settler 
upon the farm, in the latter part of the eighteenth 
century. It was an interesting monument. I 
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