To assume that rains sink into the ground and form water supplies, seems incredible when the experience of any man who has ever dug a well or sunk a shaft in a mountain, or tunneled under a hill ought to disprove such an idea at once. As we dig down we always meet water, and the deeper we get the more we find. Where does the water from the surface turn around to come back? Some of the water coming up is salt, some fresh, some hot, but mostly of a uniform coolness of about fifty degrees.
X.
GLACIERS.
We hear a great deal said about the age of Glaciers. This is assuming that the Earth has at some time been in a condition to be almost uninhabitable, as evidences of this Glacial influence seem to be reported from all parts of the globe.
As the theory of a warmer climate having existed in primeval times and that the Earth is and has been for ages cooling off hardly leaves a place for a universal period of Glaciers.
It hardly seems rational that the vast accumulation of flora to produce the coal deposits and sustain the wonderful specimens of animal and reptile growth could have been interrupted by a period of ice. If so, the earth in its present condition shows evidence of growing warmer instead of cooling off.
It is by the writer seriously doubted that the many evidences attributed to glaciers can be charged to their influence.
Where large rocks are found foreign to anything in their immediate surroundings and similar to formations at quite long distances away, the explanation that the straggling specimens were carried there by glaciers is not necessarily conclusive.
There may be many instances where such evidences are the work of glaciers, but it does not seem as if an ice age were needful to produce the changes of rock, or to show the markings on rocks claimed to have been caused by glacial abrasions. Icebergs can produce and explain every such feature as is claimed for the glacier, and there seems to be little reason to doubt that similar evidences such as are imputed to glaciers are constantly going on as much at the present day as in any remote age in the past.
There can be no doubt that icebergs have existed in all time from the earliest movement of the Earth’s machinery.
As explained in treating of icebergs, an area of extent equal to some of our smaller States frozen to a depth of thousands of feet breaks up and floats away from the polar oceans. Presuming an iceberg large as the State of Rhode Island to start off, which is very likely a small estimate of the size of many, such berg being exposed to thawing winds and the sun’s rays until thousands of miles away from its starting point, and after all these exposures is often a mass of 300 or more feet high and 2,000 feet deep. Imagine the weight and force of such a body striking the peak of some submarine mountain, the top of a hill with the momentum produced by wind and tide. There tops could as easily be wiped off and carried long distances, as a man can strike off the top of a measure of grain, and leave the same marks attributed to glaciers.