354 
BRIDGING THE AGES OF ICE 
of latitude, it occupied, but as well, the canyons by which it was 
cleft, the floe-bearing lakes and mud-charged marshes with which 
it was fringed, each island of ice, and each ice-bound lake formed 
within its limits. And it is not only necessary to reconstruct 
the geography of a dozen episodes, as does the anatomist the 
skeleton from a few bones, but to develop a geography such as 
civilized eye has never seen, and which could exist only under con¬ 
ditions such as utterly transcend the experience of civilized men. 
All this has been done. The trail of the ice monster has been 
traced, his magnitude measured, his form and even his features 
figured forth, and all from the slime of his body alone, where 
even his characteristic tracks fail.” 
As originally described in the American Journal of Science, 
the now famous exposures, on the brow of Capitol Hill, present 
the following succession of beds: 
Feet 
6.—Soil _2 
5.—Till; light reddish buff clay, with pebbles_ 7 
4.—Till, contorted and interstratified with loess_5 
3.—Loess, with numerous fossils_15 
2.—Till; dark red clay, with abundant pebbles_6 
1.—Shale, Carbonic, exposed -10 
The salient features to be especially noted are that: First, the 
lower till sheet (No. 2) represents what is now called the Kansas 
Drift, which was formed when the great continental glacier, 
reaching southward to St. Louis and Kansas City, attained its 
greatest extent and thickness; second, the loess members (Nos. 
3 and 4) composed of fine loams, constitute the soil formations 
during long interglacial epochs when the climate was not so very 
different from what it is at the present time; and third, the upper 
till (No. 5) represents what is now known as the great Wisconsin 
Drift-sheet. 
At the time when these observations were made (1882), as 
already indicated, the possible complexity of the Glacial Period 
was not yet even faintly surmised. Chances of the existence of 
a second Glacial Epoch were only vaguely being suggested. The 
prolix and bitter controversy over the duality versus the unity 
of the great Ice Period was just beginning. Under these cir- 
