The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1903-12-12
BIZ PROF. WILHELM BoELscHE.

BIZ PROF. WILHELM BoELscHE.
Copyright, 1858, by T c. McClure.)
There are two brothers that cannot sur
vive separation-Water and Life.
Water is a chemical composition like
Q thousand others. It has its fixed limits
of temperature within which il remains
true water the liquid thing that is so
indispen 50 bic to life that no plant can
drive its sap. no heart pump its blood
without IL
Zero-and the water freezes, becomes
hard stone. All water on the globe froz-
en-, and the whole wonderful machinery Of
life would stop.
Let US imagine the process developing
slowly. The temperature sinks steadily
All clouds change into snow Snow piles
itself up not only on high mountain peaks
but everywhere. From all The heights
slide ice rivers. GLACIERS. With tremend-
Gus violence the veins of ice burst within
the rocks, fragmenting them. So it pro-
ceeds until everything is one fat field Of
ice. one single boundless Greenland. And
In this ice lies life. lies humanity, buried
Ike the Siberian mammoths.
These mammoths themselves played a
role in The production of this mental pic
ture OF a new fee period. A bit of the
nineteenth century must be recalled.
THE FIRSTDISCOvERY
In its first half the world began to
mountain of granite. geology found vast
in tfa lar 10 nd
Incredible distances away from the gla-
cier districts of today the hard rocks
showed the characteristic bruises and
grooves made by the sliding sole of the
glacier. Even the limestone and sea-
shell layers of the limestone hills near
Berlin. in the fiat North German plains.
showed that gigantic glacier once crept
ever them
In the heart of Germany, France and
England lay the bones of animals some of
which still live in the ieiest Polar re-
gions. like the musk OK, others Of which
have been preserved as corpses in the
ice of the north like the mammoth ele-
plants in northern Siberia.
Old Alpine guides in Switzerland first
uttered the belief that the earth once
must have known a period of cold vastly
greater than that OF modern days.
Goethe arrived at the same idea. AT
last Agassiz knots together the loose
speculations and rounds out a picture
the picture OF the glacial period.
But Agassiz himself still labors under
the spell of Cuvier's teachings Of great
world catastrophes. He tells us that
the last great catastrophe before the
appearance of man was not caused by
red hot lava in the interior of earth, but
BY fierce cold, nunlbing ice. The mann
moths were not boiled in scalding waves
but were hurled living into ice and snow
and there froze miserably into mummeS.
And since this was the last act before
our time. it gave the world hint as 10
what will happen 10 il. When the inner
heat Of the earth shall suffice no longer
TO seize us with fiery arms and devour
us. the ice giant will come. The winter
OF the Christ Child with the icicies on
the pine trees becomes the Angel or
Death for humanity.
Agassiz- has been dead for many years
And the teaching of the glacial period
has undergone many alterations.
NO WORLD CATASTROPHE.
In the first place, painful research
which heaped pebble on pebble slowly,
proved at last that the glacial epoch