Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel | Page 7

the force
of gravity, to rearrange its molecules. It is fed by the mountains and
melted by the sun.
The glaciers are local in character, and comparatively few in number;
they are confined to valleys having some general slope downward. The
whole Alpine mass does not move down upon the plain. The movement
downward is limited to these glacier-rivers.
The glacier complies with some of the conditions of the problem. We
can suppose it capable of taking in its giant paw a mass of rock, and
using it as a graver to carve deep grooves in the rock below it; and we
can see in it a great agency for breaking up rocks and carrying the
detritus down upon the plains. But here the resemblance ends.
That high authority upon this subject, James Geikie, says:
"But we can not fail to remark that, although scratched and polished
stones occur not infrequently in the frontal moraines of Alpine glaciers,
yet at the same time these moraines do not at all resemble till. The
moraine consists for the most part of a confused heap of rough angular
stones and blocks, and loose sand and _débris_; scratched
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stones are decidedly in the minority, and indeed a close search will
often fail to show them. Clearly, then, the till is not of the nature of a
terminal moraine. Each stone in the 'till' gives evidence of having been
subjected to a grinding process. . . .
"We look in vain, however, among the glaciers of the Alps for such a
deposit. The scratched stones we may occasionally find, _but where is

the clay?_ . . . It is clear that the conditions for the gathering of a stony
clay like the I till' do not obtain (as far as we know) among the Alpine
glaciers. There is too much water circulating below the ice there to
allow any considerable thickness of such a deposit to accumulate."[1]
But it is questionable whether the glaciers do press with a steady force
upon the rocks beneath so as to score them. As a rule, the base of the
glacier is full of water; rivers flow from under them. The opposite
picture, from Professor Winchell's "Sketches of Creation," page 223,
does not represent a mass of ice, bugging the rocks, holding in its grasp
great gravers of stone with which to cut the face of the rocks into deep
grooves, and to deposit an even coating of rounded stones and clay over
the face of the earth.
On the contrary, here are only angular masses of rock, and a stream
which would certainly wash away any clay which might be formed.
Let Mr. Dawkins state the case:
"The hypothesis upon which the southern extension is founded--that the
bowlder-clays have been formed by ice melting on the land--is open to
this objection, that no similar clays have been proved to have been so
formed, either in the Arctic regions, where the ice-sheet has retreated,
or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers in the Alps or Pyrenees, or in
any other mountain-chain. . . .
The English bowlder-clays, as a whole, differ from
[1. "The Great Ice Age," pp. 70-72.]
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the moraine profonde in their softness, and the large area which they
cover. Strata of bowlder-clay at all comparable to the great clay mantle
covering the lower grounds of Britain, north of the Thames, are
conspicuous by their absence from the glaciated regions of Central
Europe and the Pyrenees, which were not depressed beneath the sea."

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A RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER.
Moreover, the Drift, especially the "till," lies in great continental sheets
of clay and gravel, of comparatively uniform thickness. The glaciers
could not form such sheets; they deposit their material in long ridges
called "terminal moraines."
Agassiz, the great advocate of the ice-origin of the Drift, says:
"All these moraines are the land-marks, so to speak, by which we trace
the height and extent, as well as the
[1. Dawkin's "Early Man in Britain," pp. 116, 117.]
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progress and retreat, of glaciers in former times. Suppose, for instance,
that a glacier were to disappear entirely. For ages it has been a gigantic
ice-raft, receiving all sorts of materials on its surface as it traveled
onward, and bearing them along with it; while the hard particles of
rocks set in its lower surface have been polishing and fashioning the
whole surface over which it extended. As it now melts it drops its
various burdens to the ground; bowlders are the milestones marking the
different stages of its journey; the terminal and lateral moraines are the
frame-work which it erected around itself as it moved forward, and
which define its boundaries centuries after it has vanished."[1]
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TERMINAL MORAINE.
And Professor Agassiz gives