Evolution (Biology); Glacial epoch; Human beings -- Origin; Human evolution
ones, and masses of till thrown down upon the rearranged and stratified
materials of the first set of moraines. Such appearances accord well
with the hypothesis of the successive phases of glacial action in
Switzerland, to which I shall presently advert.
CONTORTED STRATA OF GLACIAL DRIFT SOUTH OF IVREA.
At Mazze near Caluso (see Figure 43), the southern extremity of this
great moraine has recently been cut through in making a tunnel for the
railway which runs from Turin to Ivrea. In the fine section thus exposed
Signor Gastaldi and I had an opportunity of observing the internal
structure of the glacial formation. In close juxtaposition to a
great mass of till with striated boulders, we saw stratified beds of
alternating gravel, sand, and loam, which were so sharply bent that many
of them had been twice pierced through in the same vertical cutting.
Whether they had been thus folded by the mechanical power of an
advancing glacier, which had pushed before it a heap of stratified
matter, as the glacier of Zermatt has been sometimes known to shove
forward blocks of stone through the walls of houses, or whether the
melting of masses of ice, once interstratified with sand and gravel, had
given rise to flexures in the manner before suggested; it is at least
satisfactory to have detected this new proof of a close connection
between ice-action and contorted stratification, such as has been
described as so common in the Norfolk cliffs and which is also very
often seen in Scotland and North America, where stratified gravel
overlies till. I have little doubt that if the marine Pliocene strata
which underlie a great part of the moraine below Ivrea were exposed to
view in a vertical section, those fundamental strata would be found not
to participate in the least degree in the plications of the sands and
gravels of the overlying glacial drift.
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