The Prescott daily news., 1908-07-03

(Author of 'The Ice Age in North Amer
 ica," Man and the Glacial Pe-
 riod" Etc.)
 Copyright. Joseph B. Bowles)
 The story of the glacial period has not been half told. Its wonders are increasing every day. It is the last of the great geological epochs, and has not yet passed away. Greenland is still shivering under the rigors of glacial conditions. With the excep- tion of narrow belt of mountains around the southern end, the whole continent. some 500,000 square miles In extent is still buried beneath ice from one mile to two miles deep, while the antarctic continent, with a still greater area, is so completely en- veloped in ice that explorers have yet been able to penetrate only the merest fringe at two or three points
 But during the glacial period prop er the ice to depth of more than a mile covered 4,000000 square miles of North America and 2000,000 square miles in Europe. In North America the southern border of this ice field extended into the ocean off the New England coast, rising like a great ice wall out of the water,- and westward to line running through Long Island across New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to Salamanca, N. Y., where it turned southwestward and, with many minor variations, reached the Ohio river 50 pr GO miles above Cincinnati, crossed Kentucky and southern Indiana, reach ing it's farthest extent at Carbondale, tll.; thence northwest, it crossed the Mississippi river at St. Louis, and fol owed the Missouri and Kansas rivers 10 Topeka, where it swung northward across the eastern parts of Kansas and Nebraska, and through central Dakota to near the Canada line; thence proceeding (with long loop where 1t crossed the Rocky mountains and the Sierras) to Puget sound and the Pacific ocean. If one had ap- preached this line during the glacial period anywhere from the south, he would have immediately struck the conditions of Greenland, and found them continuous for thousands of miles, Alaska still retains the stumps of this great glacier several hundred square miles being covered by the Muir glacier alone, and still larger area by the Malaspina glacier, which comes down from Mount St. Elias. In Europe the ice fields radiated from the Scandinavian peninsula, extending across the North sea to southern Eng land, and across the Baltic to central Germany and southeastern Russia.
 In thinking of the glacial period it should be kept clearly in mind that glacial ice is simply compressed snow. Glaciers are formed wherever there is a snowfall which exceeds the melting Is familiar with the fact that a snow ball may be made as hard as ice by sufficient pressure in the hands
 That ice in great masses could flow like cold tar or molasses or any other semi fluid seemed, until a short time ago, impossible, and did not enter into the thought of mankind But about 70 years ago it was demonstrated in Switzerland that the ice was actually moving down the valleys, proceeding. not like an avalanche, but creeping with true flow, and carrying on its back and frozen into its mass frag- ments of rock of varying sizes, some of them being as large as a small house. Under the lee of one of these rock masses on top of the Aar glacier