The Democratic press. [volume] (Ravenna, O. [Ohio]) 1868-1901, 1894-11-21
LAST OF THE ICE AGE.

But now change has come upon the
forces, terrestrial or celestial, which
have wrought such havoc on our globe,
and the long winter is drawing to a
close. At first the snow and ice melt q
little faster than they form, and the
forbidding rock-olad edges of the great
white mantle draw slowly backward.
The retreat of the ice is not continuous
nor steady, and for how many hundreds
OF thousands of years the fierce strug-
| gle between heat and cold for the mas
terry of the continent may have lasted
no man can say.
At last, however, in the region o1
North America which we now inhabit,
| the sun was victor. But he looked
down upon a desolation which language
| can but feebly describe. Gone are the
forests which through earlier ages had
struggled for foothold on the hills;
swept away southwark or destroyed
are the forbidding monsters which wan
dered here. No green or growing
| thing has outlived those frigid centu-
ries, or withstood the scraping and
| soaring of the rocks. Sharp crags
and ragged peaks upon the hills are
worn and ground away, and old land.
marks forever effaced. Some of the
great inland lakes are deepened, some
are gone, while new ones here and
there are formed by the damming up OF
obliteratioR of the old watercourses by
| the vast masses of debris which the van.
ishing glacier has left.
| And now the life forces must begin
their work anew over this scene of des-
olation. The ice mantle has left moi
| do.
and piled in masses over the land, but
great gravel and clay beds here and
there witness the thoroughness of the
work. But the manufacture of sol
suited to higher plant life must be
slowly accomplished under the influ-
ence of lower forms.
And so the plants crept slowly back
over the bare SCARED rocks; at first the
lichens and their lowly brethren, then
the harder plants which had clung des.
perately to life along the borders of the
ice mantle for so many weary shivering
years; and at last, as the longer sum
mer claimed its own, the full tide OF
green and blossoming forms poured up
over the reconquered realm, bringing g
with them insects, birds, and beasts.
But Greenland. save for its scant yer.
dant fringes, still shivers in the grasp
/ of its age of ioe not vanished yet. And
if one would know how the regions
which we have just described, and now
inhabit, once looked, he has but to read
the thrilling stories of the hardy seekers
for the north pole, and especially the
tale of Nansen's wanderings over the
great ice plateau of Greenland, whose
mountain-tips are even now but just
beginning to peer out over the dreary
wastes of ice and snow. The plants
and the animals have come back to oul
region because they or their descend
ants had only to return by land over
easy paths to the home from which they
| were driven. But the warmer, inhab.
table, sea-girt borders of Greenland
are still only scantily endowed with
living forms of animals and plants
after all these centuries, because there
has been no way open to them to trave
home again, after their long exile, save
through the perilous chances of the
sea.-T Mitchell Pruddea, M D., IN
Harper's Magazine.