AC dBooks

{3}
I have put these facts as simply and baldly as I can, in order that
the reader may look steadily at them, without having his attention
drawn off, or his fancy excited, by their real poetry and grandeur.
Indeed, it would have been an impertinence to have done otherwise;
for I have never seen a live glacier, by land or sea, though I have
seen many a dead one. And the public has had the opportunity,
lately, of reading so many delightful books about "peaks, passes, and
glaciers," that I am bound to suppose that many of my readers know as
much, or more, about them than I do.
But let us go a step farther; and, bearing in our minds what live
glaciers are like, let us imagine what a dead glacier would be like;
a glacier, that is, which had melted, and left nothing but its
skeleton of stones and dirt.
We should find the faces of the rock scored and polished, generally
in lines pointing down the valleys, or at least outward from the
centre of the highlands, and polished and scored most in their upland
or weather sides. We should find blocks of rock left behind, and
perched about on other rocks of a different kind. We should find in
the valleys the old moraines left as vast deposits of boulder and
shingle, which would be in time sawn through and sorted over by the
rivers.


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