Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Of the New York geologists, Vanuxem alone, in his Geology of the Third
District, 1842, inclined to the glacial theory; the others--Emmons,
Mather, and Hall--advocated floating ice, the latter urging as a chief
objection the absence of any great northern highlands from which
glaciers could extend southward. Prof. Henry D. Rogers advocated De la
Beche's view, of great catastrophic waves or _débacles_ of water and
ice, produced by sudden uplifts of the floor of a circumpolar ocean,
and sweeping southward with tremendous power over the middle
latitudes. These views were presented by him in 1844, at the
Washington meeting of the geologists, and are to us a most curious
illustration of the old "cataclysmic" phase of geological conceptions.
Two years later Agassiz came to America, and at once set about
studying the ice evidences here, first in the White Mountains and then
around the Great Lakes. At the first meeting of the American
Association, in 1848, he presented his views as to the identity of our
phenomena with those studied by himself, Desor, and Guyot abroad. His
views were not very warmly received, however, and he did not attempt
their public presentation again for some years, turning his attention
more to the field of zoölogy. In 1850, in a work on Lake Superior, he
refers somewhat sharply to the prejudice that seemed to prevail in
relation to this subject.
From this time, however, the aqueous theories began to be less
strongly presented; and a new generation of geologists was coming on,
largely under the training of Guyot and Agassiz, and more open to
their observed results. C. B. Adams, in 1850, presented a view nearly
akin to that adopted by Dana a few years later, of an elevation of the
high northern latitudes, resulting in a southward-moving glacial
sheet, and a subsequent depression connected with its retreat, to
account for the stratified deposits. Professor Dana accepted this
doctrine in his presidential address before the association in 1855,
adding the "Terrace period" of partial re-elevation. From this time he
became the leader of the American glacialists, and his great Manual,
issued in 1862, carried these views into all the colleges of the
country.
In 1857 Prof. Edward Hitchcock published an important treatise on
Surface Geology, particularly of the Connecticut Valley, in the
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. In this paper he noted the
distinction, so important and now so familiar, between local striæ and
those with the general southward course of the "drift." Two years
later his son, Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, extended this distinction
widely over New England. In 1863 the report of progress of the
Geological Survey of Canada gave an extended review of the surface
geology, by Prof. Robert Bell, in which he fully adopted the glacial
theory. Meantime, also, Professor Ramsay, in England, had abandoned
the iceberg doctrine for that of glaciers.
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