Ice or Water (Volume 2); Another Appeal to Induction from the Scholastic Methods of Modern Geology (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1905 Excerpt: ... 440 CHAPTER XVII. THE ARCTIC REGIONS IN SO-CALLED GLACIAL TIMES. These are The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And throned Eternity in icy halls Of cold sublimity.--Bybon. In my previous work on the glacial nightmare (Glacial Nightmare, pp. 510, 511), and also in an earlier part of this work (vol. i., p. 199), I have collected the evidence which goes to show that the traces of so-called glacial action in the northern hemisphere instead of being circumpolar, are, in fact, limited to one-half only of the hemisphere, namely, to that bounded roughly on the east by the White Sea and on the west by the river Mackenzie. This does not, however, exhaust the matter, and I have further ventured to suggest (Glacial Nightmare, pp. 453-457) that while North-Eastern America on the one hand, and Scandinavia, Finland, North Russia, North Germany, Holland and Britain on the other, offer abundant evidence of the kind which is supposed to necessitate the hypothesis of a glacial period, there is no such evidence forthcoming from the other lands within the Arctic circle, and notably from Greenland, Spitzbergen and Iceland; and that it would appear, in fact, that these lands during the so-called glacial age, far from having been smothered in ice and snow, enjoyed much more temperate conditions than they do now. I now propose to examine this important matter at somewhat greater length. Before turning to the supposed evidence of former extensive glaciation in high latitudes, I wish first to make some observations of an a priori character which I think pertinent. The initial question necessary to the solution of this problem is one which has seldom or never been actually faced. Why is it that the regions round the two poles are so shr...