84 Glaciers and Glacial Radiants—Claypole. 
but they are clearly parallelled by the intricacy and depth of 
many river valleys especially in hilly or mountainous districts* 
These, if sub merged, would produce just such fiords and inlets 
as those which jag and fringe the northern coasts of America.* 
This greater preglacial altitude of the ice-radiant regions 
will also aid in the outflow of the ice. If the Lauren tides and 
the Adirondack^ and the White and Green mountains were 
then higher than now, not only is this difficulty (if it formerly 
existed) removed, but another also disappears. It has some¬ 
times been suggested that if an ice-sheet of the dimensions once 
asserted really existed, every point of high land on the eastern 
side of the continent must have been deeply buried beneath it 
and consequently no boulders could have been obtained and 
carried in moraines on the surface of the ice as was evidently 
done. This has been felt as a serious objection to the theory 
of a polar ice-cap but is obviously of far less weight against 
the theory here advocated when aided by greater pre-glacial 
altitude of land. 
Having now shown the adequacy of the theory above enun¬ 
ciated to explain the phenomena of the ice-age in North America 
we will turn to the Eastern World and try if it agrees or dis¬ 
agrees with the facts there observed. 
It is beyond all reasonable doubt that all northwestern 
Europe was, at a date not geologically very remote, covered with 
a sheet of ice which like that in North America moved over the 
surface in various directions. Observations show that the Nor¬ 
wegian mountains were the birthplace of a host of confluent 
glaciers which crept down the Dovrefeld Cordilleras to the 
Atlantic coast and even reached the British Isles, so that Scot¬ 
land and the northern and central parts of England were clad 
in the same icy mantle. Over the plains of northern and east¬ 
ern Germany we find evidence of the same condition. It ap¬ 
pears as if the even now shallow Baltic was then no obstacle in 
the way of the passage of this northern glacier. European Rus¬ 
sia shows signs of glaciation in striated rock-surfaces and travel- 
*The tremendous precipices and profoundly deep water of the Sag¬ 
uenay and other parts of the Lower St. Lawrence can scarcely be ex¬ 
plained without the admission of greater pre-glacial altitude of the land 
in Lower Canada. 
