Books: Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

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The reader will therefore understand that, in advancing into this
argument, he is not invading a realm where Science has already set up
her walls and bounds and landmarks; but rather he is entering a forum
in which a great debate still goes on, amid the clamor of many
tongues.

There are four theories by which it has been attempted to explain the
Drift.

These are:

I. The action of great waves and floods of water.

II. The action of icebergs.

III. The action of glaciers.

IV. The action of a continental ice-sheet.

We will consider these several theories in their order.

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," July, 1876, p. 290.]

{p. 10}

CHAPTER III.

THE ACTION OF WAVES.

WHEN men began, for the first time, to study the drift deposits, they
believed that they found in them the results of the Noachic Deluge;
and hence the Drift was called the Diluvium, and the period of time
in which it was laid down was entitled the Diluvial age.

It was supposed that--

"Somehow and somewhere in the far north a series of gigantic waves
was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have
precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly over
mountain and valley alike, carrying along with them a mighty burden
of rocks and stones and rubbish. Such deluges were called 'waves of
translation.'"[1]

There were many difficulties about this theory:

In the first place, there was no cause assigned for these waves,
which must have been great enough to have swept over the tops of high
mountains, for the evidences of the Drift age are found three
thousand feet above the Baltic, four thousand feet high in the
Grampians of Scotland, and six thousand feet high in New England.

In the next place, if this deposit had been swept up from or by the
sea, it would contain marks of its origin. The shells of the sea, the
bones of fish, the remains of seals and whales, would have been taken
up by these great deluges, and carried over the land, and have
remained

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 26.]

{p. 11}

mingled in the _débris_ which they deposited. This is not the case.
The unstratified Drift is unfossiliferous, and where the stratified
Drift contains fossils they are the remains of land animals, except
in a few low-lying districts near the sea.

I quote:

"Over the interior of the continent _it contains no marine fossils or
relics_."[1]

Geikie says:

"_Not a single trace of any marine organism has yet been detected in
true till_."[2]

Moreover, if the sea-waves made these great deposits, they must have
picked up the material composing them either from the shores of the
sea or the beds of streams. And when we consider the vastness of the
drift-deposits, extending, as they do, over continents, with a depth
of hundreds of feet, it would puzzle us to say where were the
sea-beaches or rivers on the globe that could produce such
inconceivable quantities of gravel, sand, and clay. The production of
gravel is limited to a small marge of the ocean, not usually more
than a mile wide, where the waves and the rocks meet. If we suppose
the whole shore of the oceans around the northern half of America to
be piled up with gravel five hundred feet thick, it would go but a
little way to form the immense deposits which stretch from the Arctic
Sea to Patagonia.

The stones of the "till" are strangely marked, striated, and
scratched, with lines parallel to the longest diameter. No such
stones are found in river-beds or on sea-shores.

Geikie says:

"We look in vain for striated stones in the gravel which the surf
drives backward and forward on a beach,

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 220.

2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 15.]

{p. 12}

and we may search the _detritus_ that beaches and rivers push along
their beds, but _we shall not find any stones at all resembling those
of the till_."[1]

But we need not discuss any further this theory. It is now almost
universally abandoned.

We know of no way in which such waves could be formed; if they were
formed, they could not find the material to carry over the land; if
they did find it, it would not have the markings which are found in
the Drift, and it would possess marine fossils not found in the
Drift; and the waves would not and could not scratch and groove the
rock-surfaces underneath the Drift, as we know they are scratched and
grooved.

Let us then dismiss this hypothesis, and proceed to the consideration
of the next.

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 69.]

{p. 13}

CHAPTER IV.

WAS IT CAUSED BY ICEBERGS?

WE come now to a much more reasonable hypothesis, and one not without
numerous advocates even to this day, to wit: that the drift-deposits
were caused by icebergs floating down in deep water over the sunken
land, loaded with _débris_ from the Arctic shores, which they shed as
they melted in the warmer seas of the south.

This hypothesis explains the carriage of enormous blocks weighing
hundreds of tons from their original site to where they are now
found; but it is open to many unanswerable objections.

In the first place, if the Drift had been deposited under water deep
enough to float icebergs, it would present throughout unquestionable
evidences of stratification, for the reason that the larger masses of
stone would fall more rapidly than the smaller, and would be found at
the bottom of the deposit. If, for instance, you were to go to the
top of a shot-tower, filled with water, and let loose at the same
moment a quantity of cannon-balls, musket-balls, pistol-balls,
duck-shot, reed-bird shot, and fine sand, all mixed together, the
cannon-balls would reach the bottom first, and the other missiles in
the order of their size; and the deposit at the bottom would be found
to be regularly stratified, with the sand and the finest shot on top.
But nothing of this kind is found in the Drift, especially in the
"till"; clay, sand, gravel, stones,

{p. 14}

and bowlders are all found mixed together in the utmost confusion,
"higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell."

Says Geikie:

"Neither can till owe its origin to icebergs. If it had been
distributed over the sea-bottom, it would assuredly have shown some
kind of arrangement. When an iceberg drops its rubbish, it stands to
reason that the heavier blocks will reach the bottom first, then the
smaller stones, and lastly the finer ingredients. There is no such
assortment visible, however, in the normal 'till,' but large and
small stones are scattered pretty equally through the clay, which,
moreover, is quite unstratified."[1]

This fact alone disposes of the iceberg theory as an explanation of
the Drift.

Again: whenever deposits are dropped in the sea, they fall uniformly
and cover the surface below with a regular sheet, conforming to the
inequalities of the ground, no thicker in one place than another. But
in the Drift this is not the case. The deposit is thicker in the
valleys and thinner on the hills, sometimes absent altogether on the
higher elevations.

"The true bowlder-clay is spread out over the region under
consideration as a somewhat widely extended and uniform sheet, yet it
may be said to fill up all small valleys and depressions, and to be
thin or absent on ridges or rising grounds."[2]

That is to say, it fell as a snow-storm falls, driven by high winds;
or as a semi-fluid mass might be supposed to fall, draining down from
the elevations and filling up the hollows.

Again: the same difficulty presents itself which we found in the case
of "the waves of transplantation." Where did the material of the
Drift come from? On what sea-shore, in what river-beds, was this
incalculable mass of clay, gravel, and stones found?

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 72.

2. "American Cyclopædia," vol. vi, p. 112.]

{p. 15}

Again: if we suppose the supply to have existed on the Arctic coasts,
the question comes,

Would the icebergs have carried it over the face of the continents?

Mr. Croll has shown very clearly[1] that the icebergs nowadays
usually sail down into the oceans without a scrap of _débris_ of any
kind upon them.

Again: how could the icebergs have made the continuous scratchings or
striæ, found under the Drift nearly all over the continents of Europe
and America? Why, say the advocates of this theory, the icebergs
press upon the bottom of the sea, and with the stones adhering to
their base they make those striæ.

But two things are necessary to this: First, that there should be a
force great enough to drive the berg over the bottom of the sea when
it has once grounded. We know of no such force. On the contrary, we
do know that wherever a berg grounds it stays until it rocks itself
to pieces or melts away. But, suppose there was such a propelling
force, then it is evident that whenever the iceberg floated clear of
the bottom it would cease to make the strive, and would resume them
only when it nearly stranded again. That is to say, when the water
was deep enough for the berg to float clear of the bottom of the sea,
there could be no striæ; when the water was too shallow, the berg
would not float at all, and there would be no striæ. The berg would
mark the rocks only where it neither floated clear nor stranded.
Hence we would find striæ only at a certain elevation, while the
rocks below or above that level would be free from them. But this is
not the case with the drift-markings. They pass over mountains and
down into the deepest valleys; they are

[1. "Climate and Time," p. 282.]

{p. 16}

universal within very large areas; they cover the face of continents
and disappear under the waves of the sea.

It is simply impossible that the Drift was caused by icebergs. I
repeat, when they floated clear of the rocks, of course they would
not mark them; when the water was too shallow to permit them to float
at all, and so move onward, of course they could not mark them. The
striations would occur only when the water was; just deep enough to
float the berg, and not deep enough to raise the berg clear of the
rocks; and but a small part of the bottom of the sea could fulfill
these conditions.

Moreover, when the waters were six thousand feet deep in New England,
and four thousand feet deep in Scotland, and over the tops of the
Rocky Mountains, where was the rest of the world, and the life it
contained?

{p. 17}

CHAPTER V.

WAS IT CAUSED BY GLACIERS?

WHAT is a glacier? It is a river of ice, crowded by the weight of
mountain-ice down into some valley, along which it descends by a
slow, almost imperceptible motion, due to a power of the ice, under
the force of gravity, to rearrange its molecules. It is fed by the
mountains and melted by the sun.

The glaciers are local in character, and comparatively few in number;
they are confined to valleys having some general slope downward. The
whole Alpine mass does not move down upon the plain. The movement
downward is limited to these glacier-rivers.

The glacier complies with some of the conditions of the problem. We
can suppose it capable of taking in its giant paw a mass of rock, and
using it as a graver to carve deep grooves in the rock below it; and
we can see in it a great agency for breaking up rocks and carrying
the _detritus_ down upon the plains. But here the resemblance ends.

That high authority upon this subject, James Geikie, says:

"But we can not fail to remark that, although scratched and polished
stones occur not infrequently in the frontal moraines of Alpine
glaciers, yet at the same time these moraines _do not at all resemble
till_. The moraine consists for the most part of a confused heap of
rough _angular_ stones and blocks, and loose sand and _débris_;
scratched

{p. 18}

stones are decidedly in the minority, and indeed _a close search will
often fail to show them_. Clearly, then, the till is not of the
nature of a terminal moraine. _Each stone_ in the 'till' gives
evidence of having been subjected to a grinding process. . . .

"We look in vain, however, among the glaciers of the Alps for such a
deposit. The scratched stones we may occasionally find, _but where is
the clay?_ . . . It is clear that the conditions for the gathering of
a stony clay like the I till' do not obtain (as far as we know) among
the Alpine glaciers. There is too much water circulating below the
ice there to allow any considerable thickness of such a deposit to
accumulate."[1]

But it is questionable whether the glaciers do press with a steady
force upon the rocks beneath so as to score them. As a rule, the base
of the glacier is full of water; rivers flow from under them. The
opposite picture, from Professor Winchell's "Sketches of Creation,"
page 223, does not represent a mass of ice, bugging the rocks,
holding in its grasp great gravers of stone with which to cut the
face of the rocks into deep grooves, and to deposit an even coating
of rounded stones and clay over the face of the earth.

On the contrary, here are only angular masses of rock, and a stream
which would certainly wash away any clay which might be formed.

Let Mr. Dawkins state the case:

"The hypothesis upon which the southern extension is founded--that
the bowlder-clays have been formed by ice melting on the land--is
open to this objection, that _no similar clays have been proved to
have been so formed_, either in the Arctic regions, where the
ice-sheet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers
in the Alps or Pyrenees, or in any other mountain-chain. . . .

The English bowlder-clays, as a whole, differ from

[1. "The Great Ice Age," pp. 70-72.]

{p. 19}

the _moraine profonde_ in their softness, and the large area which
they cover. Strata of bowlder-clay at all comparable to the great
clay mantle covering the lower grounds of Britain, north of the
Thames, are conspicuous by their absence from the glaciated regions
of Central Europe and the Pyrenees, which were not depressed beneath
the sea."

###

A RIVER ISSUING FROM A SWISS GLACIER.

Moreover, the Drift, especially the "till," lies in great continental
sheets of clay and gravel, of comparatively uniform thickness. The
glaciers could not form such sheets; they deposit their material in
long ridges called "terminal moraines."

Agassiz, the great advocate of the ice-origin of the Drift, says:

"All these moraines are the land-marks, so to speak, by which we
trace the height and extent, as well as the

[1. Dawkin's "Early Man in Britain," pp. 116, 117.]

{p. 20}

progress and retreat, of glaciers in former times. Suppose, for
instance, that a glacier were to disappear entirely. For ages it has
been a gigantic ice-raft, receiving all sorts of materials on its
surface as it traveled onward, and bearing them along with it; while
the hard particles of rocks set in its lower surface have been
polishing and fashioning the whole surface over which it extended. As
it now melts it drops its various burdens to the ground; bowlders are
the milestones marking the different stages of its journey; the
terminal and lateral moraines are the frame-work which it erected
around itself as it moved forward, and which define its boundaries
centuries after it has vanished."[1]

###

TERMINAL MORAINE.

And Professor Agassiz gives us, on page 307 of the same work, the
above representation of a "terminal moraine."

The reader can see at once that these semicircular

[1. "Geological Sketches," p. 308.]

{p. 21}

ridges bear no resemblance whatever to the great drift-deposits of
the world, spread out in vast and nearly uniform sheets, without
stratification, over hills and plains alike.

And here is another perplexity: It might naturally be supposed that
the smoothed, scratched, and smashed appearance of the underlying
rocks was due to the rubbing and rolling of the stones under the ice
of the glaciers; but, strange to say, we find that--

"The scratched and polished rock-surfaces are by no means confined to
till-covered districts. They are met with _everywhere_ and _at all
levels_ throughout the country, from the sea-coast up to near the
tops of some of our higher mountains. The lower hill-ranges, such as
the Sidlaws, the Ochils, the Pentlands, the Kilbarchan and Paisley
Hills, and others, exhibit polished and smoothed rock-surfaces _on
their very crest_. Similar markings streak and score the rocks up to
a great height in the deep valleys of the Highlands."[1]

We can realize, in our imagination, the glacier of the
mountain-valley crushing and marking the bed in which it moves, or
even the plain on which it discharges itself; but it is impossible to
conceive of a glacier upon the bare top of a mountain, without walls
to restrain it or direct its flow, or higher ice accumulations to
feed it.

Again:

"If glaciers descended, as they did, on both sides of the great
Alpine ranges, then we would expect to find the same results on the
plains of Northern Italy that present themselves on the low grounds
of Switzerland. But this is not the case. On the plains of Italy
there are no traces of the stony clay found in Switzerland and all
over Europe. Neither are any of the stones of the drift of Italy
scratched or striated."[2]

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 73.

2. Ibid., pp. 491, 492.]

{p. 22}

But, strange to say, while, as Geikie admits, no true "till" or Drift
is now being formed by or under the glaciers of Switzerland,
nevertheless "till" is found in that country _disassociated from the
glaciers_. Geikie says:

"In the low grounds of Switzerland we get a dark, tough clay, packed
with scratched and well-rubbed stones, and containing here and there
some admixture of sand and irregular beds and patches of earthy
gravel. This clay is quite unstratified, and the strata upon which it
rests frequently exhibit much confusion, being turned up on end and
bent over, exactly as in this country the rocks are sometimes broken
and disturbed below till. The whole deposit has experienced much
denudation, but even yet it covers considerable areas, and attains a
thickness varying from a few feet up to not less than thirty feet in
thickness."[1]

Here, then, are the objections to this theory of the glacier-origin
of the Drift:

I. The glaciers do not produce striated stones.

II. The glaciers do not produce drift-clay.

III. The glaciers could not have formed continental sheets of "till."

IV. The glaciers could not have existed upon, and consequently could
not have striated, the mountain-tops.

V. The glaciers could not have reached to the great plains of the
continents far remote from valleys, where we still find the Drift and
drift-markings.

VI. The glaciers are limited in number and confined in their
operations, and were utterly inadequate to have produced the
thousands of square miles of drift-_débris_ which we find enfolding
the world.

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 373.]

{p. 23}

CHAPTER VI.

WAS IT CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS?

WE, come now to the theory which is at present most generally
accepted:

It being apparent that glaciers were not adequate to produce the
results which we find, the glacialists have fallen back upon an
extraordinary hypothesis--to wit, that the whole north and south
regions of the globe, extending from the poles to 35° or 40° of north
and south latitude, were, in the Drift age, covered with enormous,
continuous sheets of ice, from one mile thick at its southern margin,
to three or five miles thick at the poles. As they find
drift-scratches upon the tops of mountains in Europe three to four
thousand feet high, and in New England upon elevations six thousand
feet high, it follows, according to this hypothesis, that the
ice-sheet must have been considerably higher than these mountains,
for the ice must have been thick enough to cover their tops, and high
enough and heavy enough above their tops to press down upon and
groove and scratch the rocks. And as the _striæ_ in Northern Europe
were found to disregard the conformation of the continent and the
islands of the sea, it became necessary to suppose that this polar
ice-sheet filled up the bays and seas, so that one could have passed
dry-shod, in that period, from France to the north pole, over a
steadily ascending plane of ice.

No attempt has been made to explain where all this

{p. 24}

ice came from; or what force lifted the moisture into the air which,
afterward descending, constituted these world-cloaks of frozen water.

It is, perhaps, easy to suppose that such world-cloaks might have
existed; we can imagine the water of the seas falling on the
continents, and freezing as it fell, until, in the course of ages, it
constituted such gigantic ice-sheets; but something more than this is
needed. This does not account for these hundreds of feet of clay,
bowlders, and gravel.

But it is supposed that these were torn from the surface of the rocks
by the pressure of the ice-sheet moving southward. But what would
make it move southward? We know that some of our mountains are
covered to-day with immense sheets of ice, hundreds and thousands of
feet in thickness. Do these descend upon the flat country? No; they
lie there and melt, and are renewed, kept in equipoise by the
contending forces of heat and cold.

Why should the ice-sheet move southward? Because, say the
"glacialists," the lands of the northern parts of Europe and America
were then elevated fifteen hundred feet higher than at present, and
this gave the ice a sufficient descent. But what became of that
elevation afterward? Why, it went down again. It had accommodatingly
performed its function, and then the land resumed its old place!

But _did_ the land rise up in this extraordinary fashion? Croll says:

"The greater elevation of the land (in the Ice period) is simply
assumed as an hypothesis to account for the cold. The facts of
geology, however, are fast establishing the opposite conclusion,
viz., that when the country was covered with ice, the land stood in
relation to the sea at a lower level than at present, and that the
continental periods or times, when the land stood in relation to the

{p. 25}

sea at a higher level than now, were the warm inter-glacial periods,
when the country was free of snow and ice, And a mild and equable
condition of climate prevailed. This is the conclusion toward which
we are being led by the more recent revelations of surface-geology,
and also by certain facts connected with the geographical
distribution of plants and animals during the Glacial epoch."[1]

H. B. Norton says:

"When we come to study the cause of these phenomena, we find many
perplexing and contradictory theories in the field. A favorite one is
that of vertical elevation. But it seems impossible to admit that the
circle inclosed within the parallel of 40°--some seven thousand miles
in diameter--could have been elevated to such a height as to produce
this remarkable result. This would be a supposition hard to reconcile
with the present proportion of land and water on the surface of the
globe and with the phenomena of terrestrial contraction and
gravitation."[2]

We have seen that the surface-rocks underneath the Drift are scored
and grooved by some external force. Now we find that these markings
do not all run in the same direction; on the contrary, they cross
each other in an extraordinary manner. The cut on the following page
illustrates this.

If the direction of the motion of the ice-sheets, which caused these
markings, was,--as the glacialists allege,--always from the elevated
region in the north to the lower ground in the south, then the
markings must always have been in the same direction: given a fixed
cause, we must have always a fixed result. We shall see, as we go on
in this argument, that the deposition of the "till" was
instantaneous; and, as these markings were made before or at the same
time the "till" was laid down, how could the land

[1. "Climate and Time," p. 391.

2. "Popular Science Monthly," October, 1879, p. 833.]

{p. 26}

possibly have bobbed up and down, now here, now there, so that the
elevation from which the ice-sheet descended

###

SKETCH OF GLACIER-FURROWS AND SCRATCHES AT STONY POINT, LAKE ERIE,
MICHIGAN.

_aa_, deep water-line; _bb_ border of the bank of earthy
materials; _cc_, deep parallel grooves four and a half feet
apart and twenty-five feet long, bearing north 60° east;
_d_, a set of grooves and scratches bearing north 60° west;
_e_, a natural bridge.

[Winchell's "Sketches of Creation," p. 213.]

was one moment in the northeast, and the next moment had whirled away
into the northwest? As the poet says:

". . . Will these trees,
That have outlived the eagle, page thy steps
And skip, when thou point'st out?"

{p. 27}

But if the point of elevation was whisked away from east to west, how
could an ice-sheet a mile thick instantaneously adapt itself to the
change? For all these markings took place in the interval between the
time when the external force, whatever it was, struck the rocks, and
the time when a sufficient body of "till" had been laid down to
shield the rocks and prevent further wear and tear. Neither is it
possible to suppose an ice-sheet, a mile in thickness, moving in two
diametrically opposite directions at the same time.

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