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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ...prevailed in the North of Europe without any such cause to influence it. Others have held that an elevation of several thousand feet in the north of the continent would as in the case of a high mountain give an arctic climate. This is plausible, but there seems no evidence, that such general elevation over the whole of North America and Europe took place at this time. Indeed, from the great upheaval of the Rocky Mountains having just been completed, such a mighty uplift in the north seems very unlikely. The widespread ice-invasion from the north over the plains, and its encroachment on territory so far south as 40 N. in North America, seems to need some astronomical explanation by which the continuous deviation of the pole of the earth from the perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, which now makes the difference between the heat of summer and cold of winter, made a general decline in the rate of temperature so great that in the north for long centuries the era of continual ice prevailed. The condition of things even now to be seen at the Canadian Pacific Railway station of Glacier, in the Selkirk Mountains, a point where the railway bed is five thousand feet above the sea, is worthy of notice. Here in a most picturesque spot we are entirely surrounded by mountains whose tops reach up 13,000 feet above the sea. High up on the slopes of these may be observed deposits of snow and ice. Along the whole line of a mountain range to the east may be seen a mer-de-glace, or sea of ice, which extends for many miles. This is perpetual ice. When snow falls on the mountain tops it is deposited in the ice field, but cannot melt and is incorporated with the older ice. On the heights even the summer heat makes little impression. These high...

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