96 
ICE-PERIOD IN AMERICA. 
Good Hope, and Van Dieman’s Land. But 
we need not build up a theoretical case in 
order to form an approximate idea of the 
great ice-sheet stretching over the northern 
part of this continent during the glacial pe¬ 
riod. It would seem that man was intended 
to decipher the past history of his home, 
for some remnants or traces of all its great 
events are left as a key to the whole. Green¬ 
land and the Arctic regions hold all that re¬ 
mains of the glacial period in North America. 
Their shrunken ice-fields, formidable as they 
seem to us, are to the frozen masses of that 
secular winter but as the patches of snow and 
ice lingering on the north side of our hills 
after the spring has opened; let us expand 
them in imagination till they extend over half 
the continent, and we shall have a sufficiently 
vivid picture of this frozen world. And a 
temperature which would bring the climate of 
Greenland down to the fortieth degree of lati¬ 
tude would not only render the field of ice far 
more extensive, but thousands of feet thicker 
than it is at present. The physical configura¬ 
tion of Greenland also confirms the possibility 
of a glacial period in America, for there we 
