The Washington times., 1923-02-11

PEELED to toss her bonnet in a
general lunar direction.
JOSEPH M'CABES Ice Ages"
Putnam) is a scientific de-
scription of the earth's varied
past, and particularly of the ice
ages which have, played so i'm
portant a part in the progress
of evolution. While we derived
much pleasure and profit from
Mr.. McCabe's book, we received
quite a shock from the exceeding
off-hand manner in which he
predicted the extinction of the
race of mankind before the adj
vance of the inevitable final
blanket of cold. We were almost
moved, as a prudent and fore
sighted man, to take steps look
ing to a better ordering of our
affairs, in order to appear to best
advantage in whatever region
we might find ourselves trans.
lated. We were treasured, sew.
eral pages further on, to find
that the kindly author placed the
final debacle some tens of mil
lions of years" in the future.
Mr.. McCabe's book is a model
of clarity, and even we, almost
totally unread in literature of
this nature, had no difficulty fol-
lowing his discourse. His theory
of the cause of the ice ages is,
briefly, this:
Water is constantly wearing
away the land. The rocks are
constantly crumbling, and every
shower washes away the refuse,
depositing it in the beds of the
oceans. It has been estimated
that the rivers Of the United States
alone convey 7s3,000,000 tons of
material from the land to the sea
each year; that the surface of our
country loses one inch deep of it's
surface each 76O years. Multiply
1873 1000, 900 tons a year by four or
five million years, and it is ap-
parent that several thousand bill
lion tons of earth would be trans.
ferred from one part of the earth's
crust to another. Most of this
would be laid on the sloping bed
of the ocean, near the shore, and
would effect a serious alteration
of the stability of the earth's
cru..t. The ocean floor would
sink slowly under the load. On
the land the lighter crust would
rise. There would be prodigious
pressure from the sea toward the
land, relieved by part of the land,
next the shore, rising in giant
folds as it is pressed against the
harder mass of the interior.
Thus, says the author, all the
mountain chains have been
formed. Now. these newly formed
mountains, by affecting air cur.
rents and ocean currents, gather
the moisture which formerly had
been pretty evenly distributed,
about their SUBMITS in form of
clouds, with consequent rain, and
later, snow and ice. Winds will
be created by the, inequality of
temperature between mountain
and plain, the air above the warm
plain rising and expanding, while
the chill air from the mountain
will take its place. The warm
moist air will replace the cold on
and it's moisture condensed into
clouds. There will be a consid-
cradle lowering Of temperature
over the whole area. That will
give in time the required fall Of
temperature. (Mr McCabe esti-
mates a change Of 10 degrees in
the mean temperature of the
earth would be sufficient to give
the conditions Of an ice age) and
the snow-laden hills will begin to
| pour their rivers of thick ice
down over the plains.
| SINCE the recent death of Elihu
| Vedder in Rome there has
been considerable discussion in
the public prints in appreciation
of his qualities as an artist and
illustrator. We have been re-
minded of the wonderful series
of drawings he made forty years
ago for the Rubiayat of Omar
Khayyam and Of the. powerful