Now, all this ice that we have been speaking of, besides being, in a secondary way, a passive agent in the affairs of man (chiefly in barring his progress northward), is one of the most potent agents in the economy of nature. It is the means by which the world is kept cool enough for man and beast to dwell in. The polar regions—north and south—are, as it were, the world’s refrigerators; tempering the heated air of the south, and, in connection with the torrid zone, spreading throughout the Earth those beneficial influences which gladden the sphere of man’s temporal existence.
Chapter Eleven.
Ice an Agent in transporting Boulders—How this comes about—Dr Kane’s Observations—Long Night in Winter and Long Day in Summer—Extreme Darkness—Influence on Dogs—Intense Cold—Effect on the Sea.
There are many things in this world which, up to within a few years back, have been to men a source of surprise and mystery.
Some of these problems have been solved by recent travellers, and not a few of them are referable to polar oceans and ice.
In many parts of our coasts we find very striking and enormously large boulder-stones lying on the beach, perfectly isolated, and their edges rounded away like pebbles, as if they had been rolled on some antediluvian beach strewn with Titanic stones. These boulders are frequently found upon the loose sands of the sea-shore, far removed from any rocks or mountains from which they might be supposed to have been broken; and, more than that, totally different in their nature from the geological formations of the districts in which they are found. “Whence came these?” has been the question of the inquisitive of all ages, “and how came they there?”
There may, for aught we know to the contrary, be more than one answer to these questions; but there is at least one which is quite satisfactory as to how and whence at least some of them have come. Ice was the means of conveying these boulders to their present positions.
It has been said that once upon a time a large part of this country was under the dominion of ice, even as the polar regions and some of the mountains and valleys of Norway are at the present day; that the boulders we see in elevated places were conveyed thither by glacier action; and that when the glacial period passed away, they were left there on the hill-sides—sometimes almost on the mountain-tops. But this is not the question we are considering just now. We are now inquiring into the origin of those huge boulders that are found upon our coasts and on the coasts of other lands—boulders which could not have rolled down from the hills, for there are no hills at all near many of them; and those hills that are near some of them are of different geological formation.