Glimpses of America: A Pictorial and Descriptive History of Our Country's Scenic MarvelsBuel, James W. (James William)
History
Glimpses of America: A Pictorial and Descriptive History of Our Country's Scenic Marvels
Buel, James W. (James William)
United States -- Pictorial works
Mr. John Muir, the explorer of Muir Glacier, thus describes his visit to
that wonderful ice-swept region: “The clouds cleared away on the morning
of the 27th, and we had glorious views of the ice-rivers pouring down
from their spacious fountains on either hand, and of the grand
assemblage of mountains, immaculate in their robes of new snow, and
bathed and transfigured in the most impressively lovely sunrise light I
ever beheld. Memorable, too, was the starry splendor of a night spent on
the east side of the bay, in front of two large glaciers north of the
Muir. Venus seemed half as big as the Moon, while the berg-covered bay,
glowing and sparkling with responsive light, seemed another sky of equal
glory. Shortly after three o’clock in the morning, I climbed the
dividing ridge between the two glaciers, 2,000 feet above camp, for the
sake of the night views; and how great was the enjoyment in the solemn
silence between those two radiant skies no words may tell.”
The destructive effects of glaciers and the extent of their ravages have
been made the subject of many interesting essays by distinguished
scientists, but nowhere has it been so interestingly and understandingly
treated as by Dr. Wright in the _Edinburgh Review_, on the “Ice Age of
North America.” The monograph, much abbreviated, is as follows:
“It is not more than 10,000 years ago since the whole of North America
and Northern Europe emerged from beneath a deluge of ice which seems to
have destroyed the aboriginal inhabitants as remorselessly as Noah’s
flood.
“The chipped flint implement-makers perished with their contemporaries,
the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the sabre-toothed tiger, and
left the globe to be repeopled by the polished stone-working or
Neolithic progenitors of its actual inhabitants. The gap between the two
races is conspicuous, and has not yet been archæologically bridged. A
catastrophe is indicated; and a catastrophe by water. This is the
conclusion of science; how singularly it harmonizes with the biblical
narrative is almost superfluous to point out.”
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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