Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

QA. THE DUIFT.

ice came from ; or what force lifted the moisture into the air which, afterward descending, constituted these worldcloaks of frozen water.

It is, perhaps, easy to suppose that such world-cloaks might have existed ; we can imagine the water of the seas falling on the continents, and freezing as it fell, until, in the course of ages, it constituted such gigantic ice-sheets ; but something more than this is needed. This does not account for these hundreds of feet of clay, bowlders, and gravel.

But it is supposed that these were torn from the surface of the rocks by the pressure of the ice-sheet moying southward. But what would make it move southward ? We know that some of our mountains are covered to-day with immense sheets of ice, hundreds and thousands of feet in thickness, Do these descend upon the flat country? No; they lie there and melt, and are renewed,kept in equipoise by the contending forces of heat and cold.

Why should the ice-sheet move southward? Because, say the ‘“‘glacialists,” the lands of the northern parts of Europe and America were then elevated fifteen hundred feet higher than at present, and this gave the ice a suilicient descent. But what became of that elevation afterward ? Why, it went down again. It had accommodatingly performed its function, and then the land resumed its old place !

But did the land rise up in this extraordinary fashion ? Croll says :

“The greater elevation of the land (in the Ice period) is simply assumed as an hypothesis to account for the cold. The facts of geology, however, are fast establishing the opposite conclusion, viz., that when the country Was covered with ice, the land stood in relation to the sea at a lower level than at present, and that the continental periods or times, when the land stood in relation to the