THE HANDWRITING OF THE GLACIERS AND THE ROMANS
Here is an interesting relic of ancient days that will enable you to compare the chirography of the Old Men of the Mountain with that of the Romans. These are marks left by the masons on Roman walls. They show just what part each mason laid, so that if the wall proved defective the authorities would know who was responsible.
All quite striking, isn't it, this strange kind of writing on the walls of time? As if, among the ruins that are all there is left of the fallen Roman Empire, we should in some heap of dust and crumbled stone find one of the very tablets on which Cæsar wrote his commentaries and there engraved in Cæsar's own hand:
THIS STYLE IS CALLED FLUTING
Looks like moulding, doesn't it? This is a piece of rock, and it was carved in that way by the glaciers with their tools of embedded stone. The deeper grooves were made where the rock was softer or where the glacier's chisels were of a particularly hard quality, such as flint or granite.
"Cæsar, maximis bellis confectis, in hiberna exercitum deduxit."
Can you translate that for us? (This to the High School Boy.)
"As easy as anything," says he. "Cæsar, on completion of these great wars, led his army into winter quarters."
And that same phrase might serve in Mr. Glacier's Commentaries too. For the glaciers of the Ice Age, after their great work was done, also went into winter quarters; melting back to the present snow-line in our mountains and the regions of eternal ice around the pole.