A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
History
A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
American journal of science; Science -- United States -- History
By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was recognized that the
“drift,” whatever its origin, was not of world-wide extent. In America
its characteristic features were found best developed north of latitude
40 degrees; in Europe, the Alps, the Scottish Highlands, and Scandinavia
were recognized as type areas. The limits were unassigned, partly
because the field had not been surveyed, but largely because criteria
for the recognition of drift had not been established. The well-known
hillocks and ridges of “diluvium” and “alluvium” and “drift” of New
Jersey and Ohio, and the mounds of the Missouri Cotou elaborately
described by Catlin (1840)[56] bore little resemblance to the walls of
unsorted rock which stand as moraines bordering Alpine glaciers. The
Orange sand of Mississippi was included in the drift by Hilgard
(1866),[57] and the gravels at Philadelphia by Hall (1876).[58] Stevens
(1873)[59] described trains of glacial erratics at Richmond, Virginia,
and William B. Rogers (1876)[60] accounts for certain deposits in the
Potomac, James, and Roanoke rivers by the presence of Pleistocene ice
tongues or swollen glacial rivers, and remarks: “It is highly probable
that glacial action had much to do with the original accumulation of the
rocky debris on the flanks of the Blue Ridge, and in the Appalachian
valleys beyond.” Kerr (1881)[61] referred the ancient erosion surface of
the Piedmont belt in North Carolina to glacial denudation, De la Beche
compared the drift of Jamaica with that of New England, and Agassiz
interpreted soils of Brazil as glacial.
The first detailed description and unequivocal interpretation of either
terminal or recessional moraines is from the pen of Gilbert (1871),[62]
geologist of the Ohio Survey. In discussing the former outlet of Lake
Erie through the Fort Wayne channel, Gilbert writes:
“The page of history recorded in these phenomena is by no means
ambiguous. The ridges, or, more properly, the ridge which determines
the courses of the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers is a buried
terminal moraine of the glacier that moved southwestward through the
Maumee valley. The overlying Erie Clay covers it from sight, but it is
shadowed forth on the surface of that deposit, as the ground is
pictured through a deep and even canopy of snow. Its irregularly
curved outline accords intimately with the configuration of the
valley, and with the direction of the ice markings; its concavity is
turned toward the source of motion; its greatest convexity is along
the line of least resistance.
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