GLACIAL EPOCHS.
Previous to the glacial record there had closed a long period of perpetual spring. The primitive elephant, and many of his congeners and contemporaries, fed in luxurious forests and grassy plains toward the north pole, which are now covered with glaciers grinding their bones to dust. Northern regions which for untold ages had been covered with tropical vegetation, and animals of innumerable forms, began to be invaded by glaciers which slowly made their way toward the equator.
The only way glaciers are now formed is by vapors wafted over them from adjacent lands warmed by solar heat; but they were not formed that way during the glacial epochs, but by the declension of annular vapors. Glacial ice cannot accumulate extensively now. It flows, and cannot be heaped up largely, its rate of motion being proportionate to the slope of its bed. The source of those snows which built a great continental ice cap over the northern hemisphere must be attributed to the Annular System. They accumulated in the St. Lawrence valley several thousand feet thick and towered over the New England mountains.
Snow seldom falls in arctic regions now. Dr. Kane saw sledge tracks that were made several years previously. How then did those boundless reaches of snow and ice accumulate but by the descent of Annular vapors?
Animals are found entombed in the frozen soil and snows under the arctic circle. For many years a large trade has been carried on in ivory, by Siberian traders, dug from the frozen soil. Many of the animals, as the mammoth, rhinoceros, etc., remain undecayed, and in their stomachs and between their teeth are found the vegetation upon which they fed. And even the capillary blood vessels still retaining their contents, showing that there was not the slightest decomposition, but that the catastrophe which overwhelmed them was sudden. The climate was changed as by a stroke, which congealed and sealed the land in ice, locking the mammoth and other animals therein.
Had those animals not been frozen soon as killed, putrification and decomposition must have taken place. Nothing but the down-rush of snows from the earth’s Annular System could have done this. These remains are dredged from the northern oceans, and they are also found fossilized over large portions of Siberia; in both cases being doubtless dropped from icebergs. The mammoth is found frozen in a glacier; the glacier was originally snow; the destruction must necessarily have been sudden.
If not more than one tenth of the waters now upon the earth had fallen in the form of snow it would have covered the entire land surface of the globe more than 30,000 feet deep; and as one tenth must have fallen in polar regions it brings out the Annular Theory as a competent source. The sudden fall of snow sufficient to overwhelm a semi-tropical world could not accumulate in the atmosphere as it now does, and fall therefrom. It must have come from a source beyond the atmosphere.
The overcanopying fund of vapors acted as a mighty robe to the earth, keeping out the cold of space, and equally distributing solar heat over the globe and causing terrestial warmth. The animals were much larger than their representatives are now, showing that the atmosphere was heavier and possessed more buoyant power by the pressure of a vast ocean of vapors in the higher regions.
The downfall of water caused continual upheavals, and mountain making, which is proved by finding marine fossils along the seashore, and elsewhere far above the ocean. Terraces of the Champlain epoch in New England that must have been formed in the sea, are now found elevated hundreds of feet.
All geologists agree that there have been many floods upon the earth. The great telluric glaciers of recent geologic times were melted under the tropic influence of the Annular vapors resulting in deluges.
Under the vast pressure of the accumulated waters the plastic ocean bed goes down and forces its foundation under the continent by lateral pressure, and causes upturned and crumpled strata in many places, and also volcanic phenomena.