The ocean of fresh-water proves the augmentation of snows from the great super-aerial fund. The Cretaceous age closed by excessive and unusual refrigeration. The transported blocks of stone found in the Upper Cretaceous and Lower Tertiary point to a northern origin. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of an Annular fall of waters in the north polar world at that time.
Existing continents were submerged under Cretaceous waters. The Rocky Mountains, Andes, Alps and Himalayas were either unborn or in their infant stage. But some mighty barrier was raised that rolled the Cretaceous waters southward, and made an isolated fresh-water ocean on the north. It was the great Atlantic plateau reaching from Newfoundland to Ireland, which is known by actual soundings and other evidence to be a submerged table land. It was raised from the deep at this very time and stood for uncounted milleniums as dry land.
Suppose an ice cap 5000 feet thick should suddenly cover the Arctic world. It would press that part of the globe inward and downward upon itself even if the planet were solid to the centre. It would render the rocks plastic and they would be pushed under the continents causing the crust of the earth to rise into mountains in many places. Just what occurred in Cretaceous and Tertiary times.
We can trace the shore-line of an almost limitless fresh-water sea around the whole hemisphere in Tertiary times, showing that the Arctic ocean was a wide expanse of fresh-waters. This leads to the positive and permanent establishment of the Vailian or Annular theory.
APPENDIX.
THE LAST ADVANCE OF GLACIERS.
The last downfall of exterior vapors was at the time of Noah, and produced the deluge. These vapors naturally gravitated toward the polar regions and falling there as snows would accumulate as glaciers, their magnitude and extent corresponding with the amount of falling snows. It is evident if there ever was an Eden climate upon the earth its destruction was brought about by a change of climate. If the Deluge was a collapse of the last remnant of upper waters the latter must have begun to fall in polar regions many centuries previous.
The Eden world suffered a change of climate during the Adamic age, for the race that dwelt naked in Eden became clothed in the skins of animals. If this infant race dwelt naked the climate was warm. If afterward it became necessary to be clothed with the skins of animals it certainly had become cold. If the cold increased it was probably caused by the fall of snow in polar regions. The physical condition of the antedeluvians and their environment depended on the conditions of the upper vapors. Hence, polar glaciers began to advance in Edenic times.
Glaciers advanced slowly, and are still advancing. Eight hundred years ago Greenland was not the frigid land it now is. The Icelanders and the Northmen sailed through northern seas in the interest of commerce where now our hardiest seamen with iron-clad vessels scarcely dare to venture. They pushed forward commercial enterprises into lands that are now inhospitable and uninhabited.
The present glaciation of polar worlds is but the result of the last declension of outward vapors. The great ice caps of polar regions are moving toward the equator and are constantly diminishing. It is possible that we are approaching a day when the last ice berg will be borne toward the tropics, and the last glacier will melt, and a more genial climate pervade the greater portion of the earth.