It is unnecessary to-day to explain at any length the evidences by which
geologists trace this enormous glaciation of the northern hemisphere.
There are a few works still in circulation in which popular writers,
relying on the obstinacy of a few older geologists, speak lightly of the
"nightmare" of the Ice-Age. But the age has gone by in which it could
seriously be suggested that the boulders strewn along the east of
Scotland--fragments of rock whose home we must seek in Scandinavia--were
brought by the vikings as ballast for their ships. Even the more serious
controversy, whether the scratches and the boulders which we find on the
face of Northern Europe and America were due to floating or land ice,
is virtually settled. Several decades of research have detected the
unmistakable signs of glacial action over this vast area of the northern
hemisphere. Most of Europe north of the Thames and the Danube, nearly
all Canada and a very large part of the United States, and a somewhat
less expanse of Northern Asia, bear to this day the deep scars of
the thick, moving ice-sheets. Exposed rock-surfaces are ground and
scratched, beds of pebbles are twisted and contorted hollows are scooped
out, and moraines--the rubbish-heaps of the glaciers--are found on every
side. There is now not the least doubt that, where the great Deinosaurs
had floundered in semi-tropical swamps, where the figs and magnolias had
later flourished, where the most industrious and prosperous hives of
men are found to-day, there was, in the Pleistocene period, a country to
which no parallel can be found outside the polar circles to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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