268 ICE-MARKS AND ANCIENT GLACIERS. 
have borne down from the mountains and spread out in 
fertile plains. 
Such are the lessons to be learned of drifted boulders, 
ice-marks, and moraines. Now looking back through thé 
past, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years, when 
an ice-dome capped these mountains, then probably rising 
much higher above the sea, and sending a glacier down 
each broad valley into the ocean, where their huge icy 
cliffs were layed by the waters of a frozen sea, we have 
to imagine ourself as if on the present coast of Greenland 
or Spitzbergen, and, looking inland from some mountain 
peak upon the coast, behold a vast sea of ice with jagged 
peaks rising up through the broad expanse, cleaving and 
throwing aside the slowly, imperceptibly moving currents 
of this inland sea of ice. Near the sea, partly warmed 
perhaps by the remote influence of the Gulf Stream, 
whose powers upon the coast of New England were 
greatly lessened during this period of intense arctic cold, 
were sunny valleys, carpeted with moss and sprinkled 
sparingly with lovely arctic flowers,—whose descendants 
still linger upon the summit of Mount Washington, —half- 
hidden beneath the snows, or clinging to the cliffs as if 
shrinking from the icy embrace of the glacier. Here the 
Reindeer and the Bison* met in herds, the arctic Foxes 
barked, and the arctic Hare nibbled the short summer's 
growth ; while upon the drifting ice-cakes the Polar Bear 
sat watching for some stray seal, and the Mammoth, 
found fossil over the northern part of both hemispheres, 
__ *The teeth of the Walrus and the Bison were discovered by Sir Charles Lyell in 
the clay-beds at Gardiner, Maine. These are still preserved in a privato collage 
