Rupert Brooke - "Letters from America"

Kenneth Grahame - "Pagan Papers"

Thames Ross Williamson - "Problems in American Democracy"

Rudyard Kipling - "Kim"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Elements of Geology

W >> William Harmon Norton >> The Elements of Geology




Revived by the uplift, the streams of the area trenched it as
deeply as its elevation permitted, and reaching grade, opened up
wide valleys and new peneplains in the softer rocks. The
Connecticut valley is Tertiary in age, and in the weak Triassic
sandstones has been widened in places to fifteen miles. Dating
from the same time are the valleys of the Hudson, the Susquehanna,
the Delaware, the Potomac, and the Shenandoah.

In Pennsylvania and the states lying to the south the Mesozoic
peneplain lies along the summits of the mountain ridges. On the
surface of this ancient plain, Tertiary erosion etched out the
beautifully regular pattern of the Allegheny mountain ridges and
their intervening valleys. The weaker strata of the long, regular
folds were eroded into longitudinal valleys, while the hard
Paleozoic sandstones, such as the Medina and the Pocono, were left
in relief as bold mountain walls whose even crests rise to the
common level of the ancient plain. From Virginia far into Alabama
the great Appalachian valley was opened to a width in places of
fifty miles and more, along a belt of intensely folded and faulted
strata where once was the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. In
Figure 70 the summit of the Cumberland plateau (ab) marks the
level of the Mesozoic peneplain, while the lower erosion levels
are Tertiary and Quaternary in age.

LIFE OF THE TERTIARY PERIOD

VEGETATION AND CLIMATE. The highest plants in structure, the
DICOTYLS (such as our deciduous forest trees) and the MONOCOTYLS
(represented by the palms), were introduced during the Cretaceous.
The vegetable kingdom reached its culmination before the animal
kingdom, and if the dividing line between the Mesozoic and the
Cenozoic were drawn according to the progress of plant life, the
Cretaceous instead of the Tertiary would be made the opening
period of the modern era.

The plants of the Tertiary belonged, for the most part, to genera
now living; but their distribution was very different from that of
the flora of to-day. In the earlier Tertiary, palms flourished
over northern Europe, and in the northwestern United States grew
the magnolia and laurel, along with the walnut, oak, and elm. Even
in northern Greenland and in Spitzbergen there were lakes covered
with water lilies and surrounded by forests of maples, poplars,
limes, the cypress of our southern states, and noble sequoias
similar to the "big trees" and redwoods of California. A warm
climate like that of the Mesozoic, therefore, prevailed over North
America and Europe, extending far toward the pole. In the later
Tertiary the climate gradually became cooler. Palms disappeared
from Europe, and everywhere the aspect of forests and open lands
became more like that of to-day. Grasses became abundant,
furnishing a new food for herbivorous animals.

ANIMAL LIFE OF THE TERTIARY. Little needs to be said of the
Tertiary invertebrates, so nearly were they like the invertebrates
of the present. Even in the Eocene, about five per cent of marine
shells were of species still living, and in the Pliocene the
proportion had risen to more than one half.

Fishes were of modern types. Teleosts were now abundant. The ocean
teemed with sharks, some of them being voracious monsters seventy-
five feet and even more in length, with a gape of jaw of six feet,
as estimated by the size of their enormous sharp-edged teeth.

Snakes are found for the first time in the early Tertiary. These
limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike
ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be
distinguished from those of the present day.

MAMMALS OF THE EARLY TERTIARY. The fossils of continental deposits
of the earliest Eocene show that a marked advance had now been
made in the evolution of the Mammalia. The higher mammals had
appeared, and henceforth the lower mammals--the monotremes and
the marsupials--are reduced to a subordinate place.

These first true mammals were archaic and generalized in
structure. Their feet were of the primitive type, with five toes
of about equal length. They were also PLANTIGRADES,--that is, they
touched the ground with the sole of the entire foot from toe to
heel. No foot had yet become adapted to swift running by a
decrease in the number of digits and by lifting the heel and sole
so that only the toes touch the ground,--a tread called
DIGITIGRADE. Nor was there yet any foot like that of the cats,
with sharp retractile claws adapted to seizing and tearing the
prey. The forearm and the lower leg each had still two separate
bones (ulna and radius, fibula and tibia), neither pair having
been replaced with a single strong bone, as in the leg of the
horse. The teeth also were primitive in type and of full number.
The complex heavy grinders of the horse and elephant, the sharp
cutting teeth of the carnivores, and the cropping teeth of the
grass eaters were all still to come.

Phenacodus is a characteristic genus of the early Eocene, whose
species varied in size from that of a bulldog to that of an animal
a little larger than a sheep. Its feet were primitive, and their
five toes bore nails intermediate in form between a claw and a
hoof. The archaic type of teeth indicates that the animal was
omnivorous in diet. A cast of the brain cavity shows that, like
its associates of the time, its brain was extremely small and
nearly smooth, having little more than traces of convolutions.

The long ages of the Eocene and the following epochs of the
Tertiary were times of comparatively rapid evolution among the
Mammalia. The earliest forms evolved along diverging lines toward
the various specialized types of hoofed mammals, rodents,
carnivores, proboscidians, the primates, and the other mammalian
orders as we know them now. We must describe the Tertiary mammals
very briefly, tracing the lines of descent of only a few of the
more familiar mammals of the present.

THE HORSE. The pedigree of the horse runs back into the early
Eocene through many genera and species to a five-toed, [Footnote:
Or, more accurately, with four perfect toes and a rudimentary
fifth corresponding to the thumb.] short-legged ancestor little
bigger than a cat. Its descendants gradually increased in stature
and became better and better adapted to swift running to escape
their foes. The leg became longer, and only the tip of the toes
struck the ground. The middle toe (digit number three), originally
the longest of the five, steadily enlarged, while the remaining
digits dwindled and disappeared. The inner digit, corresponding to
the great toe and thumb, was the first to go. Next number five,
the little finger, was also dropped. By the end of the Eocene a
three-toed genus of the horse family had appeared, as large as a
sheep. The hoof of digit number three now supported most of the
weight, but the slender hoofs of digits two and four were still
serviceable. In the Miocene the stature of the ancestors of the
horse increased to that of a pony. The feet were still three-toed,
but the side hoofs were now mere dewclaws and scarcely touched the
ground. The evolution of the family was completed in the Pliocene.

The middle toe was enlarged still more, the side toes were
dropped, and the palm and foot bones which supported them were
reduced to splints.

While these changes were in progress the radius and ulna of the
fore limb became consolidated to a single bone; and in the hind
limb the fibula dwindled to a splint, while the tibia was
correspondingly enlarged. The molars, also gradually lengthened,
and became more and more complex on their grinding surface; the
neck became longer; the brain steadily increased in size and its
convolutions became more abundant. The evolution of the horse has
made for greater fleetness and intelligence.

THE RHINOCEROS AND TAPIR. These animals, which are grouped with
the horse among the ODD-TOED (perissodactyl) mammals, are now
verging toward extinction. In the rhinoceros, evolution seems to
have taken the opposite course from that of the horse. As the
animal increased in size it became more clumsy, its limbs became
shorter and more massive, and, perhaps because of its great
weight, the number of digits were not reduced below the number
three. Like other large herbivores, the rhinoceros, too slow to
escape its enemies by flight, learned to withstand them. It
developed as its means of defense a nasal horn.

Peculiar offshoots of the line appeared at various times in the
Tertiary. A rhinoceros, semiaquatic in habits, with curved tusks,
resembling in aspect the hippopotamus, lived along the water
courses of the plains east of the Rockies, and its bones are now
found by the thousands in the Miocene of Kansas. Another developed
along a line parallel to that of the horse, and herds of these
light-limbed and swift-footed running rhinoceroses ranged the
Great Plains from the Dakotas southward.

The tapirs are an ancient family which has changed but little
since it separated from the other perissodactyl stocks in the
early Tertiary. At present, tapirs are found only in South America
and southern Asia,--a remarkable distribution which we could not
explain were it not that the geological record shows that during
Tertiary times tapirs ranged throughout the northern hemisphere,
making their way to South America late in that period. During the
Pleistocene they became extinct over all the intervening lands
between the widely separated regions where now they live. The
geographic distribution of animals, as well as their relationships
and origins, can be understood only through a study of their
geological history.

THE PROBOSCIDIANS. This unique order of hoofed mammals, of which
the elephant is the sole survivor, began, so far as known, in the
Eocene, in Egypt, with a piglike ancestor the size of a small
horse, with cheek teeth like the Mastodon's, but wanting both
trunk and tusks. A proboscidian came next with four short tusks,
and in the Miocene there followed a Mastodon (Fig. 346) armed with
two pairs of long, straight tusks on which rested a flexible
proboscis.

The DINOTHERE was a curious offshoot of the line, which developed
in the Miocene in Europe. In this immense proboscidian, whose
skull was three feet long, the upper pair of tusks had
disappeared, and those of the lower jaw were bent down with a
backward curve in walrus fashion.

In the true ELEPHANTS, which do not appear until near the close of
the Tertiary, the lower jaw loses its tusks and the grinding teeth
become exceedingly complex in structure. The grinding teeth of the
mastodon had long roots and low crowns crossed by four or five
peaked enameled ridges. In the teeth of the true elephants the
crown has become deep, and the ridges of enamel have changed to
numerous upright, platelike folds, their interspaces filled with
cement. The two genera--Mastodon and Elephant--are connected by
species whose teeth are intermediate in pattern. The proboscidians
culminated in the Pliocene, when some of the giant elephants
reached a height of fourteen feet.

THE ARTIODACTYLS comprise the hoofed Mammalia which have an even
number of toes, such as cattle, sheep, and swine. Like the
perissodactyls, they are descended from the primitive five-toed
plantigrade mammals of the lowest Eocene. In their evolution,
digit number one was first dropped, and the middle pair became
larger and more massive, while the side digits, numbers two and
five, became shorter, weaker, and less serviceable. The FOUR-TOED
ARTIODACTYLS culminated in the Tertiary; at present they are
represented only by the hippopotamus and the hog. Along the main
line of the evolution of the artiodactyls the side toes, digits
two and five, disappeared, leaving as proof that they once existed
the corresponding bones of palm and sole as splints. The TWO-TOED
ARTIODACTYLS, such as the camels, deer, cattle, and sheep, are now
the leading types of the herbivores.

SWINE AND PECCARIES are two branches of a common stock, the first
developing in the Old World and the second in the New. In the
Miocene a noticeable offshoot of the line was a gigantic piglike
brute, a root eater, with a skull a yard in length, whose remains
are now found in Colorado and South Dakota.

CAMELS AND LLAMAS. The line of camels and llamas developed in
North America, where the successive changes from an early Eocene
ancestor, no larger than a rabbit, are traced step by step to the
present forms, as clearly as is the evolution of the horse. In the
late Miocene some of the ancestral forms migrated to the Old World
by way of a land connection where Bering Strait now is, and there
gave rise to the camels and dromedaries. Others migrated into
South America, which had now been connected with our own
continent, and these developed into the llamas and guanacos, while
those of the race which remained in North America became extinct
during the Pleistocene.

Some peculiar branches of the camel stem appeared in North
America. In the Pliocene arose a llama with the long neck and
limbs of a giraffe, whose food was cropped from the leaves and
branches of trees. Far more generalized in structure was the
Oreodon, an animal related to the camels, but with distinct
affinities also with other lines, such as those of the hog and
deer. These curious creatures were much like the peccary in
appearance, except for their long tails. In the middle Eocene they
roamed in vast herds from Oregon to Kansas and Nebraska.

THE RUMINANTS. This division of the artiodactyls includes
antelopes, deer, oxen, bison, sheep, and goats,--all of which
belong to a common stock which took its rise in Europe in the
upper Eocene from ancestral forms akin to those of the camels. In
the Miocene the evolution of the two-toed artiodactyl foot was
well-nigh completed. Bonelike growths appeared on the head, and
the two groups of the ruminants became specialized,--the deer with
bony antlers, shed and renewed each year, and the ruminants with
hollow horns, whose two bony knobs upon the skull are covered with
permanent, pointed, horny sheaths.

The ruminants evolved in the Old World, and it was not until the
later Miocene that the ancestors of the antelope and of some deer
found their way to North America. Mountain sheep and goats, the
bison and most of the deer, did not arrive until after the close
of the Tertiary, and sheep and oxen were introduced by man.

The hoofed mammals of the Tertiary included many offshoots from
the main lines which we have traced. Among them were a number of
genera of clumsy, ponderous brutes, some almost elephantine in
their bulk.

THE CARNIVORES. The ancestral lines of the families of the flesh
eaters--such as the cats (lions, tigers, etc.), the bears, the
hyenas, and the dogs (including wolves and foxes)--converge in the
creodonts of the early Eocene,--an order so generalized that it
had affinities not only with the carnivores but also with the
insect eaters, the marsupials, and the hoofed mammals as well.
From these primitive flesh eaters, with small and simple brains,
numerous small teeth, and plantigrade tread, the different
families of the carnivores of the present have slowly evolved.

DOGS AND BEARS. The dog family diverged from the creodonts late in
the Eocene, and divided into two branches, one of which evolved
the wolves and the other the foxes. An offshoot gave rise to the
family of the bears, and so closely do these two families, now
wide apart, approach as we trace them back in Tertiary times that
the Amphicyon, a genus doglike in its teeth and bearlike in other
structures, is referred by some to the dog and by others to the
bear family. The well-known plantigrade tread of bears is a
primitive characteristic which has survived from their creodont
ancestry.

CATS. The family of the cats, the most highly specialized of all
the carnivores, divided in the Tertiary into two main branches.
One, the saber-tooth tigers (Fig. 351), which takes its name from
their long, saberlike, sharp-edged upper canine teeth, evolved a
succession of genera and species, among them some of the most
destructive beasts of prey which ever scourged the earth. They
were masters of the entire northern hemisphere during the middle
Tertiary, but in Europe during the Pliocene they declined, from
unknown causes, and gave place to the other branch of cats,--which
includes the lions, tigers, and leopards. In the Americas the
saber-tooth tigers long survived the epoch.

MARINE MAMMALS. The carnivorous mammals of the sea--whales,
seals, walruses, etc.--seem to have been derived from some of the
creodonts of the early Tertiary by adaptation to aquatic life.
Whales evolved from some land ancestry at a very early date in the
Tertiary; in the marine deposits of the Eocene are found the bones
of the Zeuglodon, a whalelike creature seventy feet in length.

PRIMATES. This order, which includes lemurs, monkeys, apes, and
man, seems to have sprung from a creodont or insectivorous
ancestry in the lower Eocene. Lemur-like types, with small, smooth
brains, were abundant in the United States in the early Tertiary,
but no primates have been found here in the middle Tertiary and
later strata. In Europe true monkeys were introduced in the
Miocene, and were abundant until the close of the Tertiary, when
they were driven from the continent by the increasing cold.

ADVANCE OF THE MAMMALIA DURING THE TERTIARY. During the several
millions of years comprised in Tertiary time the mammals evolved
from the lowly, simple types which tenanted the earth at the
beginning of the period, into the many kinds of highly specialized
mammals of the Pleistocene and the present, each with the various
structures of the body adapted to its own peculiar mode of life.
The swift feet of the horse, the horns of cattle and the antlers
of the deer, the lion's claws and teeth, the long incisors of the
beaver, the proboscis of the elephant, were all developed in
Tertiary times. In especial the brain of the Tertiary mammals
constantly grew larger relatively to the size of body, and the
higher portion of the brain--the cerebral lobes--increased in size
in comparison with the cerebellum. Some of the hoofed mammals now
have a brain eight or ten times the size of that of their early
Tertiary predecessors of equal bulk. Nor can we doubt that along
with the increasing size of brain went a corresponding increase in
the keenness of the senses, in activity and vigor, and in
intelligence.





CHAPTER XXII

THE QUATERNARY


The last period of geological history, the Quaternary, may be said
to have begun when all, or nearly all, living species of mollusks
and most of the existing mammals had appeared.

It is divided into two great epochs. The first, the Pleistocene or
Glacial epoch, is marked off from the Tertiary by the occupation
of the northern parts of North America and Europe by vast ice
sheets; the second, the Recent epoch, began with the disappearance
of the ice sheets from these continents, and merges into the
present time.

THE PLEISTOCENE EPOCH

We now come to an episode of unusual interest, so different was it
from most of the preceding epochs and from the present, and so
largely has it influenced the conditions of man's life.

The records of the Glacial epoch are so plain and full that we are
compelled to believe what otherwise would seem almost incredible,
--that following the mild climate of the Tertiary came a succession
of ages when ice fields, like that of Greenland, shrouded the
northern parts of North America and Europe and extended far into
temperate latitudes.

THE DRIFT. Our studies of glaciers have prepared us to decipher
and interpret the history of the Glacial epoch, as it is recorded
in the surface deposits known as the drift. Over most of Canada
and the northern states this familiar formation is exposed to view
in nearly all cuttings which pass below the surface soil. The
drift includes two distinct classes of deposits,--the unstratified
drift laid down by glacier ice, and the stratified drift spread by
glacier waters.

The materials of the drift are in any given place in part unlike
the rock on which it rests. They cannot be derived from the
underlying rock by weathering, but have been brought from
elsewhere. Thus where a region is underlain by sedimentary rocks,
as is the drift-covered area from the Hudson River to the
Missouri, the drift contains not only fragments of limestone,
sandstone, and shale of local derivation, but also pebbles of many
igneous and metamorphic rocks, such as granites, gneisses,
schists, dike rocks, quartzites, and the quartz of mineral veins,
whose nearest source is the Archean area of Canada and the states
of our northern border. The drift received its name when it was
supposed that the formation had been drifted by floods and
icebergs from outside sources,--a theory long since abandoned.

The distribution also of the drift points clearly to its peculiar
origin. Within the limits of the glaciated area it covers the
country without regard to the relief, mantling with its debris not
only lowlands and valleys but also highlands and mountain slopes.

The boundary of the drift is equally independent of the relief of
the land, crossing hills and plains impartially, unlike water-laid
deposits, whose margins, unless subsequently deformed, are
horizontal. The boundary of the drift is strikingly lobate also,
bending outward in broad, convex curves, where there are no
natural barriers in the topography of the country to set it such a
limit. Under these conditions such a lobate margin cannot belong
to deposits of rivers, lakes, or ocean, but is precisely that
which would mark the edge of a continental glacier which deployed
in broad tongues of ice.

THE ROCK SURFACE UNDERLYING THE DRIFT. Over much of its area the
drift rests on firm, fresh rock, showing that both the preglacial
mantle of residual waste and the partially decomposed and broken
rock beneath it have been swept away. The underlying rock,
especially if massive, hard, and of a fine grain, has often been
ground down to a smooth surface and rubbed to a polish as perfect
as that seen on the rock beside an Alpine glacier where the ice
has recently melted back. Frequently it has been worn to the
smooth, rounded hummocks known as roches moutonnees, and even
rocky hills have been thus smoothed to flowing outlines like
roches moutonnees on a gigantic scale. The rock pavement beneath
the drift is also marked by long, straight, parallel scorings,
varying in size from deep grooves to fine striae as delicate as
the hair lines cut by an engraver's needle. Where the rock is soft
or closely jointed it is often shattered to a depth of several
feet beneath the drift, while stony clay has been thrust in among
the fragments into which the rock is broken.

In the presence of these glaciated surfaces we cannot doubt that
the area of the drift has been overridden by vast sheets of ice
which, in their steady flow, rasped and scored the rock bed
beneath by means of the stones with which their basal layers were
inset, and in places plucked and shattered it.

TILL. The unstratified portion of the drift consists chiefly of
sheets of dense, stony clay called till, which clearly are the
ground moraines of ancient continental glaciers. Till is an
unsorted mixture of materials of all sizes, from fine clay and
sand, gravel, pebbles, and cobblestones, to large bowlders. The
stones of the till are of many kinds, some having been plucked
from the bed rock of the locality where they are found, and others
having been brought from outside and often distant places. Land
ice is the only agent known which can spread unstratified material
in such extensive sheets.

The FINE MATERIAL of the till comes from two different sources. In
part it is derived from old residual clays, which in the making
had been leached of the lime and other soluble ingredients of the
rock from which they weathered. In part it consists of sound rock
ground fine; a drop of acid on fresh, clayey till often proves by
brisk effervescence that the till contains much undecayed
limestone flour. The ice sheet, therefore, both scraped up the
mantle of long-weathered waste which covered the coun try before
its coming, and also ground heavily upon the sound rock
underneath, and crushed and wore to rock flour the fragments which
it carried.

The color of unweathered till depends on that of the materials of
which it is composed. Where red sandstones have contributed
largely to its making, as over the Triassic sandstones of the
eastern states and the Algonkian sandstones about Lake Superior,
the drift is reddish. When derived in part from coaly shales, as
over many outcrops of the Pennsylvanian, it may when moist be
almost black. Fresh till is normally a dull gray or bluish, so
largely is it made up of the grindings of unoxidized rocks of
these common colors.

Except where composed chiefly of sand or coarser stuff,
unweathered till is often exceedingly dense. Can you suggest by
what means it has been thus compacted? Did the ice fields of the
Glacial epoch bear heavy surface moraines like the medial and
lateral moraines of valley glaciers? Where was the greater part of
the load of these ice fields carried, judging from what you know
of the glaciers of Greenland?