"Nature," as Sir Thomas Browne so finely said, "is the art of God." And nowhere is this art more striking in its beauty than in the work done by the glaciers. Those wonderful falls and the blue inland seas we call the Great Lakes, and thousands of smaller lakes scattered all over where the glaciers came, are only a part of this art work. The main ice sheets, you notice, didn't reach down among the mountains of California, but these mountains had small glaciers of their own in those days, just as they have now. Only they were much larger then because, as we have seen, it was such a snowy time all over the northern world. Listen to what these home-made glaciers of California did, and listen to how John Muir tells it:
AND TO THINK WE DID IT ALL!
"It is hard," he says, "without long and loving study, to realize how great was the work done. Before the glaciers came, the range"—he is speaking of the Sierras—"was comparatively simple; one vast wave of stone in which a thousand mountains, domes, canyons, ridges, and so forth lay concealed." To carve them out of the stone "nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or the lightning, but the tender snow flowers, noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries. The snowflakes said, 'Come, we are feeble; let us help one another. Marching in close, deep ranks let us roll away the stones from these mountain sepulchres, and set the landscape free.'"
It is evident that this was all in the Great Plan of things. For the rocks had to be of a certain kind and laid in a certain way for the little members of this art society of the sky to work these landscapes out. And the rocks were so made and laid when they were at least a mile below the surface on which the glaciers set to work.
"It was while these features were taking form in the depths of the range, the particles of the rocks marching to their appointed places in the dark, that the particles of icy vapor in the sky, marching to the same music, assembled to bring them to the light. Then, after their grand task was done, these bands of snow flowers, the mighty glaciers, were melted and removed, as if of no more importance than dew destined to last but an hour."[7]
[7] "The Mountains of California." John Muir.
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
How do you suppose warm water—of all things!—could have caused the Ice Age? This theory is one that was offered by a very eminent geologist, Doctor Shaler, of Harvard.[8]