The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Not only does the glacier collect a variety of foreign materials on its
upper surface, but its sides as well as its lower surface are studded
with boulders, stones, pebbles, sand, coarse and fine gravel, so that it
forms in reality a gigantic rasp, with sides hundreds of feet deep, and
a surface thousands of feet wide and many miles in length, grinding over
the bottom and along the walls between which it moves, polishing,
grooving, and scratching them as it passes onward. One who is familiar
with the track of this mighty engine will recognize at once where the
large boulders have hollowed out their deeper furrows, where small
pebbles have drawn their finer marks, where the stones with angular
edges have left their sharp scratches, where sand and gravel have rubbed
and smoothed the rocky surface, and left it bright and polished as if it
came from the hand of the marble-worker. These marks are not to be
mistaken by any one who has carefully observed them; the scratches,
furrows, grooves, are always rectilinear, trending in the direction in
which the glacier is moving, and most distinct on that side of the
surface-inequalities facing the direction of the moving mass, while the
lee-side remains mostly untouched.
It may be asked, how it is known that the glacier carries this powerful
apparatus on its sides and bottom, when they are hidden from sight. I
answer, that we might determine the fact theoretically from certain
known conditions respecting the conformation of the glacier; to which I
shall allude presently; but we need not resort to this kind of evidence,
since we have ocular demonstration of the truth. Here and there on the
sides of the glacier it is possible to penetrate between the walls and
the ice to a great depth, and even to follow such a gap to the very
bottom of the valley, and everywhere do we find the surface of the ice
fretted as I have described it, with stones of every size, from the
pebble to the boulder, and also with sand and gravel of all sorts, from
the coarsest grain to the finest, and these materials, more or less
firmly set in the ice, form the grating surface with which, in its
onward movement down the Alpine valleys, it leaves everywhere
unmistakable, traces of its passage.
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