Glacial Geology in America, — Fairchild. i6i 
In a review of Dr. Jackson's report, T. T. Bouve wrote as 
follows : 
"In view of all that is known of the movement of diluvium in this 
■coiTtry we cannot but regard the glacial theory as wholly inadequate 
to produce the results met with, and we think with Dr. Jackson that 
the grooves on the rocks, if produced by glaciers, should radiate from 
our principal mountain ranges and should be more abundant in their 
immediate vicinity, while they should be wanting in the level country 
and over our extended tablelands!" 
The most ardent and extreme champion of De la Beche's 
hypothesis of catastrophic waves or debacles of water was 
Prof. H. D. Rogers. The following quotation from his pres- 
idential address before the fifth meeting of the Association of 
American Geologists, held at Washington, May. 1844, will 
■give a sufficient idea of this hypothesis. After discussing the 
drift at great length and reviewing all the explanation that 
liad been proposed, he gives the following as his own views: 
"If we will conceive, then, a wide expanse of waters, less perhaps 
than one thousand feet in depth, dislodged from high northern or 
circumpolar basin, by a general lifting of that region of perhaps a 
hundred feet, and an ecjual subsidence of the country south, and 
imagine this whole mass converted by earthquake pulsations of the 
breadth which such undulations have, into a series of stupendous and 
rapid-moving waves of translation, helped on by the still more rapid 
flexures of the floor over which they move, and then advert to the 
shattering power of the tremendous jar of the earthquake, we shall 
have an agent adequate in every way to produce the results we see, 
to float the northern ice from its moorings, to rip off, assisted with 
its aid, the outcrops of the hardest strata, to grin-d up and strew wide 
their fragments, to scour down the whole rocky floor, and, gathering 
energy with resistance, to sweep up the slopes and over the highest 
mountains." 
To us at the present time it would seem as if the mere 
statement of this hypothesis should have been sufficient for 
its own refutation. Certainly it was so far-fetched, calling in 
an agency entirely outside the range of human observation 
and knowledge, and at the same time denying the competency 
of an observable agency which was at that time reproducing 
some of the most itnportant drift phenomena, that it seems 
unscientific to the last degree. Yet, in 1849. three years after 
Agassiz had come to America and long after the detailed ar- 
guments for glacial agency had been fully and clearly set be- 
fore American readers, professor Rogers wrote: 
