The Jackson standard. [volume] (Jackson C.H., Ohio) 1847-1888, 1875-10-21
From the Scientific American.

/ In the heat of the summer moth ing is
more refreshing than generous quantity
of ice And it may be refreshing to the
mind, at least, to contemplate in these
sultry summer days, the great sheet of
ice that once enveloped all the northern
part of our continent, and of the globe
| as we'll
All have seen the immense boulders,
called lost rock" in some sections, scat
tered over the northern part of the Unit
ed States, which have little or no resem-
blance to any mass of rock in place any
where in their vicinity, and have perhaps
asked the question-Where did they
come from also, the heaps of sand,
gravel and cobble stones of various sizes,
which form many of our ridges, knolls,
and hills and which are totally unlike
any fixed rock near them Some of
these have coarse and fine pebbles pro-
miscuously mixed together and others
show beds of stratiication in which the
coarse and fine seem to be sorted and
arranged by themselves. Some, too,
have doubtless seen the parallel scratches
on the surface of rocks, and noticed, as
| the Indians did before them, that they
all have one direction, and that is usually
north and south Now all these phenom-
ena are attributed to q single cause, and
that is the great sheet of ice which Ma
ture stored up ages ago without the ne
cessity of protecting it in an icehouse.
The transported boulders, of all sizes
down to pebbles and even fine
sand, and the scratches upon the rocks,
are clear indications of movement on a
very large scale And if one takes the
trouble to search for the place whence
these erratic boulders came, he will in
variably find that it is north of the posi-
ton in which they now rest, and vary
ing in distance from a few miles to sew
eral hundreds. 1t will very frequently
be found that these masses of stone
could not have reached their present
resting place without crossing interven-
ing mountains, valleys, lakes, and some
times parts of the ocean. They are Of
ten perched in very singular and almost
inaccessible places. There is a very
large one on the summit of West Rock,
New Haven, under which the regicides |
are said to have taken refuge after the
restoration. Some are so nicely poised
in their position that they can be easily
rocked by child, though they weigh |
tens of tuns. One of the most noted of
these arratic blocks is called Pierre
Bot, of fine granite, which now rests on
the Jura, 800 feet above Lake Neufcha-
tel, near the early home of Professor
AgaSSlZ his mas a SOllu COu6euG Ol fU,-
OOOcubic feet, and was transported from
Mont Blanc across Switzerland, a dis |
tance of sixty or seventy miles. Through !
the influence of their world renowned |
fellow townsman, the city authorities of
Neufchatel have constructed promenade |
to it.
To explain the transportation of these
wanderers from their homes, various
theories have been advanced, as the et- |
fects of floods, or of powerful mud cur
rents, gas explosions of great violence,
hurting rocks in all directions, and drift |
ing ice, carrying boulders on its mass and
depositing them wherever the ice melt
ed. ButSthese and many others fail to
satisfy the observed conditions, and ut
terly fall to the ground in presence of
the facts. To our lamented Agassiz be-
longs the credit of first attributing the
cause of all our drift phenomena to gla
cial action. But he was not the first to
observe tEat boulders were carried long
distances by land ice. More than twenty
years before Agassiz announced his con-
clusions, a chamois hunter of Valias
said to NJ. Charpentier, Our glacier had
formerly much longer extent than at
present Our whole valley was occupied
by vast glacier extending as far as
Martigny, as is proved by the boulders !
found in the vicinity of this town, and
which are far too large for the water to
have carried them thither." Charpen-
tier adds that he afterwards received
similar explanations from mountaineers
in other parts of Switzerland; once, in
1884, from woodman, when he had at
that very time in his pocket u paper ad-
vancing the same theory, which he was
then going to Lurence to submit to a
convention of Swiss naturalists.
In 1886, Agassiz became acquainted
with Charpentier and was made familiar
with his investigations. Soon after, he
(Agassiz) carried the theory beyond the
limits of the Swiss Alps, and made it
embrace a sheet of snow and ice extend
ed enough to cover continent. Having
noticed that the markings in the region
of the Alps below the glaciers were the
same as those found beneath the ice
m ass, he compared these with similar
appearances in northern Europe and
Asia, which were generally attributed to
| the great flood, and made the bold gen
eralization that all were due to the very
same cause, and that one vast sheet uf
| ice must have covered all the northern
regions of the globe While these theo
ries at first met with great opposition,
| they are now universally accepted.
According to Agassiz, the sheet of ice
extended in this country as far South as
South Carolina or Alabama, and was
thick enough to cover all the mountains
of the eastern part of North America
with the exception of Mount Washing
ton. This peak projected, lone senti
mel on that vast waste of ice, two or three
hundred feet. In the latitude of north
ern Massachusetts, he conceives the ice
to have been between two and three
miles thick; and it held its direct south
erly course in spite of the mountains and
ridges over which it moved, as is indicat
ed by the direction of the parallel
grooves it made. and the trains of boul-
aers which it left The boulders were all