The late Prof. Alexander Winchell, a man who did not hesitate to express his convictions, thus bears similar testimony:--"There has been no continental glacier. There has been no uniform southerly movement of glacier masses. There has been no persistent declivity as a _sine qua non_, down which glacier movements have taken place. The continuity of the supposed continental glacier was interrupted in the regions of the dry and treeless plains of the west; and in the interior and Pacific belts of the continent within the United States, ancient glaciation was restricted to the elevated slopes."[170] He might have added that the St. Lawrence valley was submerged and received the ends of Appalachian and Adirondack glaciers on the south-east, and those of Laurentide glaciers on the north-west. [170] Nov., 1890. My friend Prof. Claypole, who, however, has some hesitation, fearing, I presume, to be cast out of the synagogue for heresy, ventures to say,[171] "We deduce from the facts and arguments stated above, that all the observations of glacial action in the northern hemisphere are explicable by assuming the existence of enormous and confluent[172] glacier-systems in and about the high lands of Europe, Asia, and America, which high lands became, therefore, glacial radiants, and shed their load of ice in all directions over the lower adjacent ground, along the lines of easiest flow; that this theory does no violence to the analogy of the existing order of things, requiring merely an enlargement of actual glaciers by the intensification of actual conditions : that abundant evidence can be obtained, as, for example, from Switzerland, that the present glacier system of the earth was once of sufficient magnitude to produce all the observed phenomena; that the most important glacial radiants in the northern hemisphere were, in North America, the district round Hudson Bay, New England and the Adirondacks, with certain areas in the western Cordilleras, and in Europe the Norwegian Dovrefelds and the Alps, Asia apparently possessing none of commensurate importance; that it satisfactorily explains, also, the previously puzzling absence of glacial action over the great plain of Siberia, the coldest portion of the northern temperate zone; that the belief in a vast polar ice cap, thousands of feet thick, covering the whole Arctic region, and extending almost continuously down to low latitudes, is an assumption doing violence to observed physical facts and to probability, that it is not required to account for the phenomena, and is, in fact, contradictory to some of them." [171] _American Geologist_, Feb., 1889. [172] The term "confluent" is not necessary here. The glaciers of all mountain chains may be said to be more or less confluent in the nevé, from which individual glaciers radiate.