Read Ebook: The Corner House Girls Among the Gypsies How They Met What Happened and How It Ended by Hill Grace Brooks Gooch Thelma Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1411 lines and 48558 words, and 29 pages

Transcriber's Note

THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES

THE

INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES.

Each book complete in One Volume, 12mo, and bound in Cloth.

New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Filth Avenue.

THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES

MAN AND

THE GLACIAL PERIOD

G. FREDERICK WRIGHT

D. D., LL. D., F. G. S. A.

FULLY ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

JUDGE C. C. BALDWIN

PRESIDENT OF THE WESTERN RESERVE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

CLEVELAND

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

IN RECOGNITION OF

HIS SAGACIOUS AND UNFAILING INTEREST IN

THE INVESTIGATIONS WHICH HAVE MADE IT POSSIBLE

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Since, as stated in the Introduction , the plan of this volume permitted only "a concise presentation of the facts," it was impossible to introduce either full references to the illimitable literature of the subject or detailed discussion of all disputed points. The facts selected, therefore, were for the most part those upon which it was supposed there would be pretty general agreement.

A similar relation of the glacial deposits of the attenuated border to the preglacial erosion of the rock gorges of the Alleghany and upper Ohio Rivers has been brought to light by the joint investigations of Mr. Frank Leverett and myself in western Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Warren, Pa., where, in an area which was affected by only the earliest glaciation, glacial deposits are found filling the rock channels of old tributaries to the Alleghany to a depth of from one hundred and seventy to two hundred and fifty feet, and carrying the preglacial erosion at that point very closely, if not quite, down to the present rock bottoms of all the streams. This removes from Professor Chamberlin a most important part of the evidence of a long interglacial period to which he had appealed; he having maintained that "the higher glacial gravels antedated those of the moraine-forming epoch by the measure of the erosion of the channel through the old drift and the rock, whose mean depth here is about three hundred feet, of which perhaps two hundred and fifty feet may be said to be rock," adding that the "excavation that intervened between the two epochs in other portions of the Alleghany, Monongahela, and upper Ohio valleys is closely comparable with this."

Mr. Leverett also presented an important paper before the Geological Society of America at its meeting at Madison, Wis., in August, 1893, adducing evidence which, he thinks, goes to prove that the post-glacial erosion in the earlier drift in the region of Rock River, Ill., was seven or eight times as much as that in the later drift farther north; while Mr. Oscar H. Hershey arrives at nearly the same conclusions from a study of the buried channels in northwestern Illinois. But even if these estimates are approximately correct--which is by no means certain--they only prove the length of the Glacial period, and not necessarily its discontinuity.

At the same time it should be said that these investigations in western Pennsylvania somewhat modify a portion of the discussion in the present volume concerning the effects of the Cincinnati ice-dam. It now appears that the full extent of the gravel terraces of glacial origin in the Alleghany River had not before been fully appreciated, since they are nearly continuous on the two-hundred-foot rock shelf, and are often as much as eighty feet thick. It seems probable, therefore, that the Alleghany and upper Ohio gorge was filled with glacial gravel to a depth of about two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet, as far down at least as Wheeling, W. Va. If this was the case, it would obviate the necessity of bringing in the Cincinnati ice-dam to account directly for all the phenomena in that region, except as this obstruction at Cincinnati would greatly facilitate the silting up of the gorge. The simple accumulation of glacial gravel in the Alleghany gorge would of itself dam up the Monongahela at Pittsburg, so as to produce the results detailed by Professor White on page 215.

Of European authorities who have recently favoured the theory of the continuity of the Quaternary Glacial period, as maintained in the volume, it is enough to mention the names of Prestwich, Hughes, Kendall, Lamplugh, and Wallace, of England; Falsan, of France; Holst, of Sweden; Credner and Diener, of Germany; and Nikitin and Kropotkin, of Russia. Among leading authorities still favouring a succession of Glacial epochs are: Professor James Geikie, of Scotland; Baron de Geer, of Sweden; and Professor Felix Wahnschaffe, of Germany.

When the first edition was issued, two years ago, there seemed to be a general acceptance of all the facts detailed in it which directly connected man with the Glacial period both in America and in Europe; and, indeed, I had studiously limited myself to such facts as had been so long and so fully before the public that there would seem to be no necessity for going again into the details of evidence relating to them. It appears, however, that this confidence was ill-founded; for the publication of the book seems to have been the signal for a confident challenge, by Mr. W. H. Holmes, of all the American evidence, with intimations that the European also was very likely equally defective. In particular Mr. Holmes denies the conclusiveness of the evidence of glacial man adduced by Dr. Abbott and others at Trenton, N. J.; Dr. Metz, at Madisonville, Ohio; Mr. Mills, at Newcomerstown, Ohio; and Miss Babbitt, at Little Falls, Minn.

The sum of Mr. Holmes's effort amounts, however, to little more than the statement that, with a limited amount of time and labour, neither he nor his assistants had been able to find any implements in undisturbed gravel in any of these places; and the suggestion of various ways in which he thinks it possible that the observers mentioned may have been deceived as to the original position of the implements found. But, as had been amply and repeatedly published, Professor J. D. Whitney, Professor Lucien Carr, Professor N. S. Shaler, Professor F. W. Putnam, of Harvard University, besides Dr. C. C. Abbott, all expressly and with minute detail describe finding implements in the undisturbed gravel at Trenton, which no one denies to be of glacial origin. In the face of such testimony, which had been before the public and freely discussed for several years, it is an arduous undertaking for Mr. Holmes to claim that none of the implements have been found in place, because he and his assistants failed to find any. To see how carefully the original observations were made, one has but to read the reports to Professor Putnam which have from time to time appeared in the Proceedings of the Peabody Museum and of the Boston Society of Natural History,, and which are partially summed up in the thirty-second chapter of Dr. Abbott's volume on Primitive Industry.

In the case of the discovery at Newcomerstown, Mr. Holmes is peculiarly unfortunate in his efforts to present the facts, since, in endeavouring to represent the conditions under which the implement was found by Mr. Mills, he has relied upon an imaginary drawing of his own, in which an utterly impossible state of things is pictured. The claim of Mr. Holmes in this case, as in the other, is that possibly the gravel in which the implements were found had been disturbed. In some cases, as in Little Falls and at Madison ville, he thinks the implements may have worked down to a depth of several feet by the overturning of trees or by the decay of the tap-root of trees. A sufficient answer to these suggestions is, that Mr. Holmes is able to find no instance in which the overturning of trees has disturbed the soil to a depth of more than three or four feet, while some of the implements in these places had been found buried from eight to sixteen feet. Even if, as Mr. Chamberlin suggests, fifty generations of trees have decayed on the spot since the retreat of the ice, it is difficult to see how that would help the matter, since the effect could not be cumulative, and fifty upturnings of three or four feet would not produce the results of one upturning of eight feet. Moreover, at Trenton, where the upturning of trees and the decaying of tap-roots would have been as likely as anywhere to bury implements, none of those of flint or jasper are buried more than a foot in depth; while the argillite implements occur as low down as fifteen or twenty feet. This limitation of flint and jasper implements to the surface is conclusively shown not only by Dr. Abbott's discoveries, but also by the extensive excavations at Trenton of Mr. Ernest Volk, whose collections formed so prominent a part of Professor Putnam's Palaeolithic exhibit at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago. In the village sites explored by Mr. Volk, argillite was the exclusive material of the implements found in the lower strata of gravel. Similar results are indicated by the excavations of Mr. H. C. Mercer at Point Pleasant, Pa., about twenty miles above Trenton, where, in the lower strata, the argillite specimens are sixty-one times more numerous than the jasper are.

To discredit the discoveries at Trenton and Newcomerstown, Mr. Holmes relies largely upon the theory that portions of gravel from the surface had slid down to the bottom of the terrace, carrying implements with them, and forming a talus, which, he thinks, Mr. Mills, Dr. Abbott, and the others have mistaken for undisturbed strata of gravel. In his drawings Mr. Holmes has even represented the gravel at Newcomerstown as caving down into a talus without disturbing the strata to any great extent, and at the same time he speaks slightingly of the promise which I had made to publish a photograph of the bank as it really was. In answer, it is sufficient to give, first, the drawing made at the time by Mr. Mills, to show the general situation of the gravel bank at Newcomerstown, in which the implement figured on page 252 was found; and, secondly, an engraving from a photograph of the bank, taken by Mr. Mills after the discovery of the implement, but before the talus had obscured its face. The implement was found by Mr. Mills with its point projecting from a fresh exposure of the terrace, just after a mass, loosened by his own efforts, had fallen away. The gravel is of such consistency that every sign of stratification disappears when it falls down, and there could be no occasion for a mistake even by an ordinary observer, while Mr. Mills was a well-trained geologist and collector, making his notes upon the spot.

I had thought at first that Mr. Holmes had made out a better case against the late Miss Babbitt's discoveries at Little Falls , but in the American Geologist for May, 1894, page 363, Mr. Warren Upham, after going over the evidence, expresses it as still his conviction that Mr. Holmes's criticism fails to shake the force of the original evidence, so that I do not see any reason for modifying any of the statements made in the body of the book concerning the implements supposed to have been found in glacial deposits. Yet if I had expected such an avalanche of criticism of the evidence as has been loosened, I should at the time have fortified my statements by fuller references, and should possibly have somewhat enlarged the discussion. But this seemed then the less necessary, from the fact that Mr. McGee had, in most emphatic manner, indorsed nearly every item of the evidence adduced by me, and much more, in an article which appeared in The Popular Science Monthly four years before the publication of the volume . In this article he had said:

"But it is in the aqueo-glacial gravels of the Delaware River at Trenton, which were laid down contemporaneously with the terminal moraine one hundred miles farther northward, and which have been so thoroughly studied by Abbott, that the most conclusive proof of the existence of glacial man is found" . "Excluding all doubtful cases, there remains a fairly consistent body of testimony indicating the existence of a widely distributed human population upon the North. American continent during the later Ice epoch" . "However the doubtful cases may be neglected, the testimony is cumulative, parts of it are unimpeachable, and the proof of the existence of glacial man seems conclusive" .

In view of the grossly erroneous statements made by Mr. McGee concerning the Nampa image , it is necessary for me to speak somewhat more fully of this important discovery. The details concerning the evidence were drawn out by me at length in two communications to the Boston Society of Natural History , which fill more than thirty pages of closely printed matter, while two or three years before the appearance of the volume the facts had been widely published in the New York Independent, the Scientific American, The Natgarden plants grown for human consumption that do not have their counterpart among the noxious weeds.

The young beets, growing in scattered clumps in the row , looked much like a certain weed of the lambs'-quarters variety; and this reddish-green weed pretty well covered the beet bed.

Tess and Dot had gone to a girls' party at Mrs. Adams', just along on Willow Street, that afternoon, so they did not appear to disturb Sammy at his task. In fact, the boy had it all his own way. Neither Uncle Rufus nor any other older person came near him, and he certainly made a thorough job of that beet bed.

Mrs. McCall "set great store," as she said, by beets--both pickled and fresh--for winter consumption. When Neale O'Neil chanced to go into the garden toward supper time to see what Sammy was doing there, it was too late to save much of the crop.

"Well, of all the dunces!" ejaculated Neale, almost immediately seeing what Sammy had been about. "Say! you didn't do that on purpose, did you? Or don't you know any better?"

"Aw--I never," gulped Sammy. "I guess I know beets."

"I don't care!" cried the tired boy wildly. "I saved just what Aggie told me to, and threw away everything else. And see how the rows are."

"I--I do-o-on't care," wailed Sammy. "I did just what Aggie told me to. And I want my half dollar."

"You want to be paid for wasting all Mrs. McCall's beets?"

"I don't care, I earned it."

Neale could not deny the statement. As far as the work went, Sammy certainly had spent time and labor on the unfortunate task.

"Wait a minute," said Neale, as Sammy started away in anger. "Maybe all those beet plants you pulled up aren't wilted. We can save some of them. Beets grow very well when they are transplanted--especially if the ground is wet enough and the sun isn't too hot. It looks like rain for to-night, anyway."

"Aw--I--"

"Come on! We'll get some water and stick out what we can save. I'll help you and the girls needn't know you were such a dummy."

"Dummy, yourself!" snarled the tired and over-wrought boy. "I'll never weed another beet again--no, I won't!"

Sammy made a bee-line out of the garden and over the fence into Willow Street, leaving Neale fairly shaking with laughter, yet fully realizing how dreadfully cut-up Sammy must feel.

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune seem much greater to the mind of a youngster like Sammy Pinkney than to an adult person. The ridicule which he knew he must suffer because of his mistake about the beet bed, seemed something that he really could not bear. Besides, he had worked all the afternoon for nothing and only the satisfaction of having earned fifty cents would have counteracted the ache in his muscles.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet