Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/318

cient, and to produce such as were would necessitate a period of cold sufficient for his hypothetical polar ice-cap. He pointed out that the northern erratics were rounded and widespread; that the highest hills were scratched and polished to their summits, while to the south the mountain tops had protruded above the ice-sheet and supplied the glaciers with their load of angular boulders. He also called attention to the absence of marine or fresh-water shells from the ground moraine deposits, showing that it was not subaqueous.

Referring to the stratified deposits overlying the drift, he wrote:

The various heights at which these stratified deposits occur above the level of the sea show plainly that since their accumulation the mainland has been lifted above the ocean at different rates in different parts of the country; further, it must be at once obvious that the various kinds of loose material all over the northern hemisphere have been accumulated, not only under different conditions, but during long-continued subsequent periods. To the first, or ice, period belong all phenomena connected with the transportation of erratic boulders, polishing, scratching, etc., during which the land stood at a higher level. To the second period belongs the stratified drift such as indicates a depression of the continent.

In 1856 Dr. Edward Hitchcock came once more to the front, through the medium of the 'Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge,' with a paper of some 150 royal quarto pages and 12 plates, in which he considered the changes which had taken place in the earth's surface since the close of the Tertiary period. The products of these changes he classed as, first, drift unmodified, and second, drift modified, including under the latter such deposits as ancient and modern beaches, submarine ridges, sea bottoms, osars, dunes, terraces, deltas and moraines. The drift proper he regarded, as before, as a product of several agencies, including icebergs, glaciers, land slips and waves of translation, which, though more active in the past than now, are still in operation.

To account for the drift accumulations at various altitudes he conceived that the water must have stood some 2,500 feet above its present level and, further, that all the northern part of the continent—at least all east of the Mississippi—had been covered by the ocean since the drift period.

As to the origin of the material of the irregular coarse deposit beneath the modified beaches and terraces (ground moraine), he agreed essentially with Naumann in supposing that, first, the eroding materials must have been comminuted stone; second, they must have been borne along under heavy pressure; third, the moving force must have operated slowly and with prodigious energy; and fourth, moving in a nearly uniform direction, though liable to local divergence; fifth, the vehicle of the eroded material could not have been water alone; but, sixth, a firm and heavy mass, somewhat plastic. The exact period of operation of the drift agency he naturally found difficulty in deter-