The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-04-22
Agassi.'s Late Glacial Discoveries.

AR0001Z'S A0C0 GI0cl0l O16cOVoTIobs
The latest intelligence from Professor
Agassiz published in another column, is
highly novel and interesting, as confrma-
tory Of his important glacial theory Lord
continents of the Southern hemisphere bore
singular resemblance to one another in the
pyramidal form of their terminal points in the
great Southern Ocean. Each Of the three pro-
montories, at Cape Horn, at the Cape Of Good
Hope and at Tasmania, on the southeastern
coast of Australia, appears to have been piled
up in the front Of o vast mass Of advancing
water and ice moving from the South Pole;
and each of them also appears to have been
partly demolished by the oversweeping ice
wave These singular facts, which have led
many eminent geographers and biologists to
the conclusion that terrible glacial deluge
once washed over the Southern continents,
crumbling them up, separating them
into different parts, strewing their debris
over our hemisphere and forming the
long slopes which incline towards the
Arctic ocean, seem to acquire new significance
ones in the neighborhood of Montevideo,
South America It is, certainly, to say the
least, q beautiful conception Of science to
divest these mighty and ancient phenomena of
their supposed purposeless action, by showing
that they have carved and sculptured the
ocean current channels, and served in q thou
sand ways to prepare it for the abode of man.
But the facts which geology can now adduce
remove this conclusion from and far beyond
the field of speculation. The valley Of the
Aar, in Switzerland, is good illustration Of
this wonderful glaciating process. After
quitting the Ice of the glacier and going down
the valley to the Grimsel, every traveller has
noticed the rocks cropping out from the bed
of the valley, rounded like hogs backs
the roches mo,aonn<s of Agassiz-or
futed, furrowed, and SCARED by the
pebbles which, the glacier held as
fine emery on its lower surface, and
with which it has ground and polished the
rocks to q vitreous smoothness. The glacial
phenomena now discovered by Agassiz are on
the cone-shaped hill or mount" situated on
the western side of the Bay Of Montevideo,
and are the most northern erratics yet found
in the Southern Hemisphere. The geographic
cal position of the hill is in latitude thirty four
degrees fifty-three minutes south and lon
gitude fifty-six degrees fourteen minutes west,
and the mount rises four hundred and sixty
five feet above the sea level. 1t consists of
blue and greenish gray adamantine silicious
clay states standing vertically on edge, trend
ing in an east-southeast and west-northwest
direction, and exhibit, says the Professor, ''all
the Characteristic features Of the roches mo,t-
tonnes of the Northern Hemisphere, proving
that the Mount Of Montevideo is hill shaped
by glacial action. He infers that there are
true erratics due to 'cosmic phenomena con-
nected with the climate of the globe and in no
way depending upon local cataclysms." 1t is
not improbable that this long-discussed and
interesting problem Of geology will be further
illuminated by the labors of Captain Hall in
his present North Polar expedition, as the
instructions to that brave explorer were to as
certain the trend and bearing of all the glacial
scratches observed upon the denudated rocks
of the North wherever he might land upon its
mysterious shores. The time is doubtless near
when these discoveries will crystalline into
something practical and utilitarian