The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1894-10-03
LAST OF TIE ICE AGE

from Harper's Magazine.
But now a 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 a
little faster than they form, and the
forbidding rock-clad edges of the great
white mantle draw slowly backward.
The retreat of the ice is not continu-
Gus nor steady, and for how many hun
dreds or thousands of years the fierce
struggle between heat and cold for the
| mastery OF the continent may have
! lasted no man can say.
AT last. however, in the region of
| North America which we now inha bit,
| the sun was victor. But he looked
down upon desolation which Ian
| guage can but feebly describe. Gone
are the forests which through earlier
ages had struggled for foothold on
the hills; swept away southwark or de-
stroyed are the forbidding monsters
which wandered here. No green or
growing thing has outlived those frigid
centuries, or withstood the scraping
and soaring of the rocks. Sharp
crags and ragged peaks upon the hills
are worn and ground away, and old
landmarks 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 or obliteration of the old water
courses by the vast masses of debris
which the vanishing glacier has left.
And now the life forces must begin
their work anew over this scene of des-
olation. The ice mantle has left not
only loose rocks and powders scat
tered 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 soil
suited to higher plant life must be
slowly accomplished under influence 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 chung
desperately to life along the borders of
the ice mantle for so many weary shiv-
iering years; and at last, as the longer
summer claimed its own, the full tide
of green and blossoming forms poured
up over the reconquered realm, bring
ing with them insects, birds and beasts
But Greenland, save for its scant YER
dant fringes, still shivers in the grasp
of its age of ice 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 espe- |
cially the tale of Nansen's wanderings /
over the great ice plateau of Greenland, |
whose mountaintips 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 our region because they or their de-
scendants had only 10 return by land
over easy paths to the home from
which they were driven. But the
warmer, inha bita BILE, sea-girt borders
of Greenland are still only scantily en-
dowed with living forms of animals
and plants after all these centuries, be-
cause there has been no way open to
them to travel home again, after their
long exile, save through the perilous
chances of the sea