Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1880-07-08
The Travels OF the Stones.

Near a house where 1 often visit
there lies in a wall fragment of round
ed stone some two feet in diameter, OF
peculiar appearance. Its large white
crystals of feldspar in the darker mass
make it very noticeable to even the
careless observer. Yet no ledge like
this stone has been found anywhere in
the vicinity. Where did it come from
Did it drop out of the sky? We might
think so if it were not the fact that
seventy-fve or eighty miles north OF
this place there are lodges of just such
material, and along the line toward
these lodges many similar stones are
found. There can be little doubt that
in some way they came from those
lodges.
1t is not always so easy to recognize
stone, but all over the country, where
there are rounded stones at all, many
of them will be found on examination
to belong to quite distant lodges. We
cannot help asking how stones could
travel so far.
The wind could not blow them along.
No beasts or birds can be thought of
as having carried them. There are
wild stories about some of the most
rocky regions that evil spirits hurled
the rocks at one another. or at angels,
in furious combat. But if we can find
any more natural way of explaining the
moving of the stones to their present
places it will be safer to accept that
than to fall back on legend and poetry.
To begin with the simplest example:
sometimes even large stones may be
carried several miles by brook or
river. Though stone will not float in
water, vet boy can lift a stone to the
top of the water which is too heavy for
him to lift out of the water. In time of
freshet, after heavy rains or when the
snow is melting in the spring, there is
sometimes force enough in the full,
rapid current to sweep and roll along
stones several feet in diameter. This
is one of the ways angular stones are
rounded into pebbles.
At the close of our northern winters,
when the ice breaks up in the rivers,
whatever is on or in the ice is carried
down the stream. The melting raft
becomes weaker mile by mile and drops
its burden sometimes near the starting
point, sometimes miles away. In these
ways the rivers may carry the stones.
Rivers do not all run now in their old
channels, so that what they brought
down hundreds of years ago may to-day
be high and dry far away from their
present beds.
The rivers alone, however, will &C
count for the transportation OF only q
very small part of the stones that have
wandered away from home. Many of
them are on the tops of hills where no
river could flow. 1 remember seeing a
great bowlder of granite on the top of
a high island in Massachusetts Bay.
There is no other granite on the island
and the shore is several miles away.
No river could have brought this stone
across the strait. Some other means
must be thought of.
We know that icebergs float hundreds
of miles, and sometimes they have
carried animals and even men long
distances. We know, too, that the sea
has in former ages covered great
regions that are now land. Lake
Champlain, for example. is now nearly
a hundred feet higher than the sea, but
along its shores and many feet higher
are clay beds in which are many salt
water shells. Once the sea filled all
that valley and overlooked into the
valley of the Hudson River, so that ice
bergs may have foated through that
arm of the sea, scattering as they melt
ed some of the strange stones we now
find in such strange places. Christian
Union