The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
But nowhere are these phenomena more striking than in Fermanagh County
about the neighborhood of Enniskillen, and more especially in the
immediate vicinity of Florence Court, the seat of the Earl of
Enniskillen. On the northern slope of Ben Calcagh are five valleys lying
parallel with each other and opening into the valley of Loch Nilly,
which runs from east to west at the base of the mountain. A road now
passes through this valley, and, where it crosses the mouth of either of
the five valleys rising towards the mountain-slope, it cuts alternately
through the two horns of a crescent-shaped wall which bars the lower end
of every one of them. These crescent-shaped mounds are so many terminal
moraines, built up by the five glaciers formerly descending through
these lateral valleys into the valley of Loch Nilly. They bore the same
relation to each other as the glaciers de Tour and d'Argentiere, the
Glacier des Bois with the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons and the
Glacier de Taconet, now bear to each other in the valley of Chamouni;
and were it not for the smaller dimensions of the whole, any one
familiar with the tracks of ancient glaciers might easily fancy himself
crossing the ancient moraines at the foot of the northern slope of the
range of Mont Blanc, through which the Arve has cut its channel, the
valley of Chamouni standing in the same relation to Mont Blanc as the
valley of Loch Nilly does to Ben Calcagh.
I have dwelt thus at length on the glaciers of Great Britain because
they have been the subject of my personal investigations. But the Scotch
Highlands and the mountains of Wales and Ireland are but a few of the
many centres of glacial distribution in Europe. From the Scandinavian
Alps glaciers descended also to the shores of the Northern Ocean and the
Baltic Sea. There is not a fiord of the Norway shore that does not bear
upon its sides the tracks of the great masses of ice which once forced
their way through it, and thus found an outlet into the sea, as in
Scotland. Indeed, under the water, as far as it is possible to follow
them through the transparent medium, I have noticed in Great Britain and
in the United States the same traces of glacial action as higher up, so
that these ancient glaciers must have extended not only to the
sea-shore, but into the ocean, as they do now in Greenland. Nor is this
all. Scandinavian boulders, scattered upon English soil and over the
plains of Northern Germany, tell us that not only the Baltic Sea, but
the German Ocean also, was bridged across by ice, on which these masses
of rock were transported. In short, over the whole of Northern Europe,
from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of its southern
promontories, we find all the usual indications of glacial action,
showing that a continuous sheet of ice once spread over nearly the whole
continent, while from all the mountain-ranges descended those more
limited glacial tracks terminating frequently in transverse moraines
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