The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1889-09-01
THE ICE AGE IN AMERICA.

New interest is awakened in geolog-
zeal circles by the issue of Wright's Ice
Age in North America, and its bearing
on the antiquity of man. Mr.. Wrightis
q professor in Oberlin College, and an
assistant on the United States Geolog-
deal Survey. He is the leading author
ity on g~laciation in America, and has
given courses of lectures before the
Lowell Institute, in Boston, and the
Peabody Institute, in Baltimore, upon
the subject. The last eight summers
have been spent in surveying the south
efn limits of the glacier in Ohio, Ken
lucky, Indiana and Pennsylvania, in
studying the living glaciers of Wash
ington Territory and the great Muir
glacier of Alaska. The great work of
Prof. Wright is set forth in a noble vol
ume of over six hundred pages. and is a
complete digest of the special investiga-
tons of the last decade which have been
carried on by many laborers in the field
of American geology. The accumula-
tions of facts, for the last ten years,
have been so rapid and from so many
sources that the ordinary student could
not keep informed of the progress made.
Prof. Wright's book contains these OBJ
s~ervations and deductions in a succinct
and interesting form, and is destined to
take its place with the "Great Ice Age"
by Geike.
The great plain of North America
offers the best field for the study of gla-
cial phenomena exposed in any CONT
nent. Europe is SO contracted that the
glacier covered it completely, driving all
it's great forests and mammals southwark
over the low plains of Germany and
Russia, literally grinding them to pow
der against the mountains of central
Europe, and forcing the debris to the
confines of the Mediterranean. Animal
and vegetable life was 81 completely
wiped off this great area that, when the
glacier retreated to the mountain heights
Of Switzerland and Norway, only a few
hardy and struggling species regained
their old dominion. But in North Amer
lea there was abundant room below the
southern limit of the glaciated area,
which extends along the south line of
Pennsylvania and Ohio, across southern
Indiana and Illinois, for the great forest
species and the large mammals to.ind a
home until the great winter had spent
its fury. Hence, in North America, we
find a ten-fold greater abundance of
trees and mammals which survived the
-I-- cd ro,rno1 70 {hnsw forrnnr
haunts.
Professor Coulter has ably shown
the influence of the glacier on
the flora Of Indiana, and the
same congratulations hold good for the
entire Mississippi valley. Indeed, it may
be said that all modern biologists, in
fact all Students of nature, accept
the glacial age as a well-defined and es-
tablished fact. Present discussion con-
fines itself to the details of the subject.
The great facts discovered half cent
ury ago by Carpenter and Agassiz
are universally taught and accepted.
These men saw the great powders and
clay banks carriedO on the back Of the Al
pine ice masses; they saw the retreat and
advance of the Swiss glaciers, shrinking
to narrow limits and plunging forward
to adjoining fields by some unexplained
power of expansion and contraction.
Charpentier saw the framework of de-
bris the Alpine glaciers left behind them,
and boldly affirmed that all the cratic
powders of the plain of Switzerland and
<ha os1ao &c &ha Tnro bod hoon cnrooA
abroad by ice, and not by water, as had
been supposed. In 1886 Agassiz spent
the summer with Carpenter in the
valley of the Rhone, to confirm his water
theories and disabuse his friend of his
errors. This visit was the opening of a
new and brilliant chapter in the life of
Agassiz, and his great work on fossil
fishes no longer commanded the great
power of his genius. The next summer
he presented to the Helvetic Ass0cia-
ton of Neuchatel the glacial theory, in
which the only error of Carpenters
was characterized as a too narrow inter-
probation of the phenomena. The local
cratic powders of the Swiss valleys were
made to assume a cosmic significance.
"a great Siberian winter" he said, "had
covered the earth with a sheet of ice
from the north pole to central Europe
and Asia. Death enveloped all nature
In a shroud. The stray powders of
Switzerland are IN accident of the vast
changes caused by the fall of the tenn
p~erature of u globe before the COM
mencement Of our epoch For ten