THE 



AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



Art. I. — Glacial Cirques near Mount Washington; by 



J. W. GoLDTHWAIT. 



Among the unsettled problems of glacial history in New 

 England, none is more inviting than that of extinct local 

 glaciers. Yet it is true that in the last thirty or forty years no 

 problem has been more neglected. It is natural that oar early 

 glacialists, eager to find phenomena in this country similar to 

 those which had been described by Louis Agassiz in the Alps, 

 and coming directly under the personal influence of that great 

 originator of the theory of an Ice Age, saw in the White 

 Mountains many features which they attributed to local glaciers 

 rather than to the " drift agency." But with the rapid prog- 

 ress in glacial studies throughout the country and the growing 

 recognition of the various types of topographic and geologic 

 evidences of the continental ice sheet, the conception of moun- 

 tain snowh'elds and valley glaciers was gradually put aside and 

 all but forgotten. There is no question that some of the alleged 

 evidences of local glaciers in northern New England which 

 these pioneers in glacial geology presented are faulty, and 

 deserved the obloquy into which they fell. Local deflection of 

 the movement of ice in the ice sheet where it followed deep 

 valleys will explain many a groove and scratch which these 

 early glacialists assigned to valley glaciers. Kame building 

 against lingering tongues of stagnant ice now explains many 

 ridges and mounds which even to the most experienced glacial- 

 ists of the earlier generation seemed accountable only as the 

 terminal moraines of valley glaciers. Nevertheless it is strange 

 that while investigators have been working out with great 

 care and in great detail the records of local Pleistocene glaciers 

 on ranges of the Rockies and Sierras, no one has searched for 

 similar evidences on the highest mountain in the eastern part 



Am. Jour. Sci. — Fourth Series, Vol. XXXY, No. 205. — January, 1913. 



