The Glacial Nightmare and the Flood. A second appeal to common sense from the extravagance of some recent geology

Front matter

THE GLACIAL NIGHTMABE AND THE FLOOD A SECOND APPEAL TO COMMON SENSE FROM THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF SOME RECENT GEOLOGY \;Y Sie HENRY H. HO WOR'JH, K.C.I.E., M.P., P.G.S., etc AUTHOR OF "TnE MAMMOTH AND THE FLOOD," "THE HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS," " CHINGHIZ KHAN AND HIS ANCESTORS," ETC, etc. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MAESTON & COMPANY Limited St. Sunstitn's Fettee Lane, Fleet Street, E.C. 1893 [AU rights reserved] Zo tbe /IDemorv of CHARPENTIER, FORBES and MURCHISON, THEEE TEACHERS FROM WHOM I HAVE LEAENT MOEE THAN I CAN TELL. I wish it were possible for me to emulate their gifts. Their industry, patience and accuracy, their sober and mature judgment, their scientific courage, and above all, the possession of that eagle eye which enabled them to overlook a great horizon without having their view distorted by the smaller details of the landscape.

Their thought and reasoning were pursued by no mediæval ghosts in the shape of scholastic formulæ, and they were not afraid to attribute great events to corresponding causes, however much the induction might jar with the shibboleths of the orthodox science of the day. If I cannot emulate their gifts I trust I may have profited by their teaching and example, and that what follows would not have been deemed by them an unworthy tribute from their disciple and follower, THE AUTHOR.

Preface

. It is a singular and a notable fact, that while most other branches of science have emancipated themselves from the trammels of metaphysical reasoning, the science of geology still remains imprisoned in " a priori" theories. It was many years ago that one of the teachers to whom I am under great obligations, Adam Sedgwick, protested with the gravity of a true philosopher against this method of reasoning. "The study of the great physical mutations on the surface of the earth," he said, "is the business of geology. But who can define the limits of these mutations? They have been drawn by the hand of Nature, and may be studied in the record of her works, but they never have been, and never will be, fixed by any guesses of our own, or by any trains of a priori reasoning based upon hypothetical analysis.

We must banish all a priori reasoning from the threshold of our argument ; and the language of theory can never fall from our lips with any grace or fitness, unless it appear as the simple enunciation of those general facts, with which, by observation alone, we have at length become acquainted. . . . Anhypothesis is indeed (when we are all agreed on receiving it) an admirable means of marshalling scattered facts together. But by those who differ from us, an hypothesis will ever be regarded with just suspicion ; for it too often becomes, even in spite of our best efforts, like a false horizon in astronomy, and vitiates all the results of our observations, however varied, or many times repeated." ' With these words I most cordially agree, but if they were wise and just in 1831, they are equally wise and just now, when our science has become more professional and when authority therefore has become more paramount.

"That the 1 Address to the Geol. Soc. Preface. VIII primary laws of Nature are immutable — that all we now see is subordinate to those immutable laws — and that we can only judge of effects which are past by the effects we behold in progress " are truisms of all science. When this sound doctrine is perverted, however, to teaching men that " the physical operations now going on are not only the type, but the measure of intensity of the physical powers acting on tbe earth at all anterior periods. This is to assume an unwarrant able hypothesis with no a priori probability." This is the language of another great geologist, a distinguished observer and generalizer. The words were originally directed against the development of the views of Hutton and Playfair, which we owe to the brilliant and fascinating pen of Lyell.

He had explained with great wealth of illustration and a wonderful command of limpid and picturesque language, the necessity of studying Nature at work, if we are to unravel the history of Nature from the ruins of her handiwork. He taught, as it had never been taught before, that rain, snow, and frost, that river and sea, that volcano and earthquake, that these and similar instruments which Nature is continuously employing now, are capable, if we allow a sufficient draft upon time, of producing the largest effects. So far no one quarrels with him, and so far he was following modern methods in science, those methods which are alone inductive and empirical. When he went beyond this he travelled beyond the true limits of induc tion, and against the journey Sedgwick, Murchison, Hopkins and others protested.

The protest was, however, largely addressed to an obstinate and perverse generation, which in its rebellion against the old teaching whereby every difficulty was solved by an appeal to the direct interposition of the Almighty, re fused to listen to any other voice than that of Uniformity. Not uniformity in the sense that Nature has worked with similar tools and with similar methods in all ages, but in the sense that she has always worked with the same vigour and intensity, or, as Mr. Conybeare translated the argument as applied to geology, because a child grows two inches every year, therefore, that is the normal growth of a human being during the thiee score years and ten which are his allotted pilgrimage. Preface. IX To uniformity in its former sense we all adhere, against uniformity in its latter and transcendental and metaphysical sense the following work is meant to be a protest as its pre decessor was.

Misleading as I deem the arguments of Lyell and his scholars to have been when applied to the older beds, they were much more so when applied to explain the superficial mantle of gravel, clay, sand, etc., which covers the ragged and ruined surface of the older rocks, and gives to tbe earth its generally smooth and undulating outline. The former deposits are for the most part arranged in regularly stratified beds, with a regular succession which can be studied in many places in an undisturbed condition. It is very different with the superficial soft beds, which are so incongruous and hetero geneous in structure, which mantle the country irrespective of its contour, which often contain blocks of stone that have travelled hundreds of miles from home, and which afford so many puzzles to us all.

Yet if there be a geological horizon, which it is important that we should study on sound principles, it is assuredly this one, for it enshrines the last completed chapter in the history of the world, and, among many other interesting riddles, contains the explanation of the mysterious problem of the origin of our race. To explain these beds has been the anxious effort of several generations of geologists, and the difficulty of the task maybe measured by the divergent theories which have been forth coming about them, and by the further fact that they still remain in many respects the despair of geology. Forbes, in his chapter on the Geological agency of Glaciers, writes as follows : "The occurrence of vast masses of primi tive rocks, apparently without any great wear and tear of travelling, upon secondary or alluvial surfaces at great dis tances from their origin, has been one of the numerous oppro bria of geology.

It is peculiarly so because a thousand cir cumstances demonstrate that the deposition of these masses has taken place at the very last period of the earth's history. No considerable changes of surface have occurred since. These blocks are superficial, naked, deposited upon bare rock, which has received no coating of soil since, and are often placed in positions of such ticklish equilibrium that any con- Preface. X siderable convulsion of nature, whether by earthquake or debacle, must inevitably have displaced them. A geologist might therefore justly be asked, " If you cannot account for these very latest and plainest phenomena of change and trans port on the earth's surface, whose various revolutions you pre tend to explain, how shall we follow you, when you tell us of the metamorphoses of slates and the throes of granite ?

" This was written in 1843. In 1866 M. d'Archiac, one of the most accomplished and trustworthy observers of recent times, could still write : " One of the epochs of Nature about which most has been written in recent times, that which immediately preceded our own and of which the duration was apparently not very long is, nevertheless, that about which we know the least, and which has given rise to the greatest number of hypotheses. The slight development of marine and lacustrine deposits, compared with the great predominance if not universal distribution of the erratic depots, their small thickness over wide extents of country, the entanglement of one part, and the regular succession of the other, the absence of regularity, symmetry and continuity in the disposition of the beds, have caused the comparisons and relations which it has been attempted to evolve from them to be incomplete and uncertain." 3 I could easily quote passages from the geological writings of men in the forefront of our science on both sides ofthe Atlantic, to show that in the year 1892 we are still face to face with the unsolved problem of rationally explaining the manifold and perverse difficulties presented by the latest geological deposits.

I have thought it right in the following pages to begin with an account at considerable length of the various theories which have been propounded to explain a large series of these beds. I have done so more especially, because my own con clusion largely involves a return to the views of those older geologists, who wrote before the world was dazzled by the extravagant development of the Glacial theory, and because their careful labours have been recently ignored. At one time most men agreed that these beds were assorted and distributed by water, and the great conflict between the Huttonians and their opponents, was as to whether the water Forbes' Travels, 40 and 41. 3 Geologie et Paleontologie 693. Preface. XI acted in anormal way, that is in the form of rivers, or the sea, or in an abnormal way, that is by means of catastrophes or debacles, as it was the fashion to call them.

It must be said that the Huttouians had found it hard to keep the field, for it seemed impossible to realize that water acting in any normal way could transport great blocks of stone for hundreds of miles, and spread vast sheets of gravel and clay over whole continents. Hence the stretching of the theory of Uniformity almost to the breaking point by Lyell and Darwin, who in order to meet the facts, postulated the submergence of whole con tinents, and the floating over them from some unknown Arctic sea of fleets of icebergs which were supposed to have sailed in and out of the Alpine valleys, across Germany and Russia, etc. etc., and to have dropped their burdens as they went. The sea bottom is then supposed to have risen again, and to have disclosed what we now see. The impossibility of maintaining this view in presence of the facts, will, I think, be found to be satisfactorily shown in the penultimate chapter of the following work ; although this was scarcely needed, since the view itself was ultimately abandoned by its principal champions.

At this stage Charpentier and Agassiz came to the rescue of the sorely tried theory of Uniformity. The Swiss geologists, who had studied the modus operandi and results of glacier work, had also noticed signs and evidences in Switzerland that the modern glaciers are only shrunken relics of much larger glaciers which at one time existed there, and that the unmis takable work of these old glaciers could be traced far down the valleys in the shape of polished and striated rocks, transported debris, etc., etc. This led to inquiry being made elsewhere, and it soon became patent that, unless we are to ignore the clearest evidence, we must allow that in the last period of the earth's history there was a development of glaciers on a large scale in nearly all latitudes where high land existed. This view, which was first propounded and elaborately argued by Charpentier, has stood the test of criticism, and seems to be established beyond question.

When ice was shown to have had a greater extension, and consequently a greater potency in former times than now, it opened up possibilities as to its capacity to explain a great Preface XII deal more than had been dreamt of. The position was at once seized by Schimper and Agassiz, and their arguments and rhetoric took the world by storm. It was plausible to argue that the same force which could carry great masses of granite and other rock from the upper Alpine valleys into the lower country, was competent when working on a larger scale to scratch, furrow and smooth wide extents of country many leagues away from any mountain chain, or any sloping ground ; to remove masses of gravel, boulders and clay, mixed with unweathered stone, over many degrees of latitude and longtitude, and to explain all the varied and widespread phenomena of the drift.

Hence the invocation of a Glacial Period to explain what were deemed to be plaiuly glacial phenomena. The Glacial theory as thus propounded by Schimper and Agassiz, was naturally very welcome to the champions of Uniformity, for it seemed to offer a way of escape from a great difficulty without appealing to other than every-day causes. It is true that the magnitude and wide geographical distribution of the facts to be explained involved unusual courage on the part of those who held this view, and some of his followers were startled and confounded by the lengths to which Agassiz was prepared to go. For he not only invoked a time when a portentous winding sheet of ice covered the temperate zone, but he also took it into the tropics, and argued that a similar icy mantle once filled the valley of the Amazon in Brazil.

While this last extension of the theory met with con siderable opposition, the main conclusion for which he fought, namely, that the drift was deposited by continental ice-sheets conterminous with the drift itself, became the predominant creed of a large and powerful school of geologists. Some of Agassiz's eager scholars soon saw that the new theory needed external support. If, as they argued, the doctrine of Uniformity is conciliated by the prospect of a great ice age and widespread ice-sheets, it also requires that such an ice age should be explained without a breach in the continuity of Nature's laws. Hence the fervid appeals by the Glacial school of geologists to astronomy and meteorology to furnish Preface. XIII a satisfactory basis on which their theory might stand, and which should enable them to say that an ice age was not a mere accidental occurrence, whose explanation is uncertain, but a part ofthe great scheme by which the Universe is governed, and the natural result of the ordinary operation of Nature's laws.

The challenge was not neglected, and many elaborate theories have been evolved by sharp-witted and ingenious men, in order to satisfy the champions of the apparently triumphant and unanswerable Glacial theory. A criticism of these various theories will be found in the following pages, where it is attempted to be shown that they have all com pletely failed, either to meet the facts of geology, or to be consistent with the laws of physics, and it seems to be as plain as anything can be that the dictum of the great French geologist, Charles Martins, is still true, namely, " that, if the Glacial theory be sound, its explanation is a secret which the future alone can disclose." One of the chief objects of the following book, however, is to show that the Glacial theory, as usually taught, is not sound, but that it ignores, and is at issue with, the laws which govern the movements of ice, while the geological phenomena to be explained refuse to be equated with it.

This is partially acknowledged by the principal apostles of the ice theory. They admit that ice as we know it in the labora tory, or ice as we know it in glaciers, acts quite differently to the ice they postulate, and produces different effects, but we are bidden to put aside our puny experiments which can be tested, and to turn from the glaciers which can be explored and examined, to the vast potentiality of ice in the shape of portentous ice-sheets beyond the reach of empirical tests, and which we are told acted quite differently to ordinary ice. That is to say, they appeal from sub-lunary experiments to a priori arguments drawn from a transcendental world. As suredly this is a curious position for the champions of Uni formity to occupy. In regard to it I will quote a fable already utilized by Hugh Miller. ' A wolf,' says Plutarch, " peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were assembled, saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. ' Ye gods ! ' he exclaimed, ' what a clamour they would have raised if they had caught me at such a banquet.' '; Preface.

XIV I hold that the Glacial theory, as ordinarily taught, is based not upon induction, but upon hypotheses, some of which are incapable of verification, while others can be shown to be false, and it has all the infirmity of the science of the Middle Ages. This is why I have called it a Glacial Nightmare. Holding it to be false, I hold further that no theory of modern times has had a more disastrously mischievous effect upon the progress of Natural Science. It is not merely in the domain of geology that its baneful influence has been felt. We cannot take up a text book, in which the profounder problems of Biology are treated, problems like the distribution of animals and plants, the pedigree of life, the origin, and beginnings ofthe human race, without being impressed with its influence as a factor.

Iu all these and many other inquiries, the postulate of an ice age forms a necessary element of current theories. The length of the following argument is in fact the homage paid to the widespread influence of the theory, which made it incumbent in disputing it to do so with such care and completeness as I can command, amid manifold duties, and indifferent health. What, then, is shortly the burden of the following argument ? I admit completely, that the position maintained by Char pentier in his work on Glaciers is unassailable, first, because it makes no appeal to any occult and hidden forces underlying the movements of ice, but proves the existence of greater glaciers formerly by comparing and equating the ruins they have left with the ruins made by existing glaciers. Secondly, because it is consistent with all the geological facts that we can summon to test it by.

On the other hand, I not only dis believe in, but I utterly deny the possibility of ice having moved over hundreds of miles of level country, such as we see in Poland and Russia, and the prairies of North America, and distributed the drift as we find it there. I further denyT its capacity to mount long slopes, or to traverse uneven ground except when under the impulse of gravity. I similarly deny to it the excavating and denuding power which has been attributed to it by those who claim it as the excavator of lakes and valleys, and I altogether question the legitimacy of arguments based upon a supposed physical capacity which Preface. XV cannot be tested by experiment, and which is entirely based upon hypothesis. This means that I utterly question the prime postulate ofthe Glacial theory itself.

The purport of the following pages, however, is not wholly critical and destructive. If we sweep away the Glacial theory in its extravagant form, we have not swept away the difficulties which it was introduced to explain. It is our duty, it seems to me, in view of the importance of the issue, to meet these difficulties. How then are they to be met ? The answer to this question I have tried to give in the last chapters of this book. The answer is not one consistent with the modern developments of the theory of Uniformity, and for those who hold with Ramsay that Nature has not varied either in the rapidity, the intensity, or the quality of her work since she began to mould the world, there is nothing in those chapters which can prove acceptable. My masters, Sedgwick and Murchison, taught me a very different lesson which I have seen no reason whatever to unlearn.

They taught me that no plainer witness is to be found of any physical fact than that Nature has at times worked with enormous energy and rapidity, and at others much more evenly and quietly, and that the rocky strata teem with evidence of violent and sudden dis locations on a great scale. That these catastrophes were aimless and lawless, I do not believe. On the contrary, they were the result of law, but of a law whose tendency we have not yet perhaps duly measured, and whose key we might perhaps have discovered if we had not been pursuing the fantastic shadows of metaphysical reasoning for so many years. This conclusion is, in effect, the same as that arrived at by some of the best writers on the subject. Let me quote from one of them. " No one appreciates more highly than I do," says Mr. Bab bace, " the labours of those older geologists," that is, Lyell and his school, " who first taught an earlier generation to estimate more truly the power and efficiency of certain forces which act very slowly but continuously during long periods of time.

The error in scientific speculation against which they fought was the error of laying exclusive or exaggerated stress upon forces of a particular kind — forces the existence of which they did not deny, but which had worked only at comparatively Preface. XVI distant intervals and in alliance always with other forces, the operation of which is ceaseless. It is precisely the same error in principle, though exhibited in a different form, which is now exhibited by those geologists who attribute almost everything to running water and to scraping ice. They are simply catastrophists in a new dress. They attribute extravagant power and stupendous effects to one form of force instead of to another. There is, indeed, one difference, and it is a difference in favour of the older school of catastrophists rather than of the younger — that whereas there never could be any doubt of the adequacy of subterranean force to produce the effects ascribed to it, there is the greatest doubt of the adequacy of rain and ice to effect in any time, however long, the stupendous changes ascribed to them by Mr. Geikie.

On the other, there is really nothing stupendous about these effects when they are regarded in connection with the known and visible effects of subterranean force. The highest ranges of mountains we have are, relatively to the circumference of the earth's crust, infinitely smaller than the puckers on an orange-skin." 4 Again, the same writer says : " Magnitude is all relative. The store of Time and the store of Force may be regarded as both unlimited. But it does not follow that in accounting for any given effect we are entitled to draw to an unlimited extent either upon the one or upon the other. Extravagant demands may as easily be made upon the one or upon the otnSr. The inventions and imaginations to which the extreme giacialists resort are, beyond all comparison, more violent than those which were common with the old convul sionists.

Whole continents are built up upon the top of the existing mountains, which there is no proof whatever ever existed ; and then these continents are all ground down by ice or washed away by ordinary surf, and yet so that not a fragment shall be left behind. I venture to believe that I shall have some support from the great leaders of geological science, who, in power of intellect, are still young among us, when I record my dissent from the extravagant theories of the younger giacialists." ° With this reasoning I quite agree. The earth seems to me ' Babbage, Journ. Geol. Soc. xxiv. 272 and 273. 5 Id. xxiv. 273. Preface. XVII to be full of evidence of intermittent violence and repose. In facing the solution of the Drift problem I must be taken therefore to postulate, not merely the possibility of catastrophes, but to maintain that they have occurred frequently in the world's history.

Secondly, I would claim that while the Glacial theory makes demands upon the powers of ice which are inconsistent with its proved qualities and cannot be made to fit in with the facts which have to be explained, the power to which I appeal makes no demands whatever upon any force but that of which we can establish the competency, both by direct experiment and by theoretical calculation, and that, so far as we know, it explains all the facts. Thirdly, this explanation is one which was deemed satis factory and complete by the Fathers of Geology, men who were quite as keen observers and quite as keen critics as their descendants, and who were also more independent, and less dominated by official orthodoxy in Science. For a long time some of the most brilliant masters of our science were advocates of the Diluvial theory as an adequate explanation of the facts.

It is true that some of them attempted to explain too much by this cause, and that until Charpentier published his famous work the operations of land ice; on a much larger scale than that in which it works now, had^ieen overlooked. It is true, also, that the views they maintained were in some cases sophisticated by an appeal to untenable postulates, b,ut in the main the theory, of which I am an advocate, is a return to that so strenuously supported by Hall and Cony beare, Von Buch, Sedgwick, Murchison, D'Archiac, Phillips, and many others. Lastly, I claim to have already established the necessity of this appeal on entirely different grounds. In my previous work on the " Mammoth and the Flood," I collected a great mass of evidence which went to show that the Mammoth and some of its companions, including so-called palæolithic man, were swept away in wide areas by a great flood of waters which drowned them, and then covered them with continuous layers of loam and gravel.

The facts and the arguments adduced in that book have been referred to many times by many writers for their manifold character and widea Preface. XVIII reaching and cumulative effect, and I am pleased to think that some of the first authorities in this country and else where in the realms of Physics of Natural History and Archæology, have assured me that they considered the argu ment unanswerable in so far as the particular facts referred to are concerned, and that what is needed is that it should be supplemented by a similar argument based on geological grounds. On the other hand, in the many reviews of that book which have appeared here in France and Germany and in America, I know of none in which its arguments have been met or traversed, while the great majority give a verdict of suspense dependent on the production of adequate geological evidence.

In the following pages, then, I claim to have shown that a widespread flood, which seems to be a necessary postulate, if we are to adequately gijapple with the extinction of the Pleistocene fauna, is an equally necessary postulate if the geological facts are to be duly explained. At all events, I claim for my arguments that they deserve adequate criticism. I am not aware that I have omitted to notice a single fact or diffi culty which heeds explanation, and I have tried to make the book a fairly complete monograph on the controversies with which it deals. That it contains many faults, both of com mission and omission, I know well, and those who have tried to wade through the vast multitude of publications dealing with the problems here discussed, and who realize also the many and critical and necessary side issues which have had to be sifted and criticized in the process of exhausting the problem, will be tender and considerate to my method and my plan.

For the facts, arguments, and conclusions adduced, I ask for no quarter. If they can be shown to be false and misleading, they had better be swept away mercilessly. If they are true, as I believe them to be, they cannot be ignored. Meanwhile I am ready to enter the arena and to fight hard for them. The book does not exhaust the problem, nor does it pro fess to do so. When it was begun I hoped to have brought together all the geological evidence bearing upon it, but the necessity of entering at much greater length than I intended into the history of the Glacial theory if I was to do justice to the predecessors, upon whose shoulders I am privileged to Preface. XIX stand, and the necessity also of discussing at adequate length the many theories of Ice motion and the various astronomical and meteorological explanations of the Ice age, have made it impossible to condense all my arguments in one book.