314 The American Geologist. November, 1901. 
its front an increased steepness of slope, whereby any slight 
halt or readvance due to a series of years of unusual ct>ld and 
snow-fall became recorded in a marginal moraine. 
The predominantly wasting ice border rose probably to an 
altitude of 5,000 feet within a hundred miles from its edge 
while being dissolved by the warm Chamlplain climate with 
somewhat lower altitude of the land than now. If the retreat 
of the ice-sheet from the northern United States and Canada 
occupied, as I think, some three to five thousand years, dis- 
appearing earliest from the upper Missouri and Mississippi 
basins, and latest from New England, the province of Que- 
bec, and Labrador, the extensicn of a warm temperate flora 
and fauna could well keep pace with the glacial recession, so 
that, as on the waning^ Malaspina ice-sheet, a flora like that 
of the same latitude today, and concomitant temperate mol- 
luscan and insect life, may well have thrived up to the very 
boundary of the ice, or perhaps in the case of the plants and 
insects even extending, as in Alaska, upon the drift-dovered 
ice-border. 
Darwin noted, in his narrative of the voyage of the Beagle, 
that glaciers in the fjords of southern Chile reach down to the 
sea level within nine degrees of latitude from where palms 
flourish. Professor W. O. Crosby tells me of his observations 
of fine orchards of cherries and other fruits cultivated close 
to tlie limits of the large local fields of ice and neve in Nor- 
way, one of which has an area of about five hundred square 
miles. In t!je Alps the glaciers end only a few hundred feet 
from productive fields and gardens of flowers. Still more 
like the condition of North America and Europe during the 
recession of their Pleistocene ice-sheets is the vast fertile 
plain of India, enjoying a tropical climate, while within a 
short distance along its northern side, and farther west and 
east for an extent of 1,500 miles, runs the almost impassable 
Himalayan range with valleys bearing glaciers and summits 
crowned with perpetual snow. 
The proximity of the very cold Himalayas does not bring 
frosts to the neighboring tropical plain. In like injanner the 
ice-sheet still lingering on northern Ontario, New York, and 
New England, probably did not cause a very frigid climate 
to prevail in the winters, nor nights of frost in the summers. 
