The glacier milk which colors the streams that flow from beneath it finally settles and makes clay.  Off the great Malaspina Glacier in Alaska the ocean is tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fifty miles from the shores.  Very few country people, even among the educated, are ready to believe that this enormous ice-sheet ever existed.  To make them believe that it is just as much a fact in the physical history of this continent as the war of the Revolution is a fact in our political history is no easy matter.  It certainly is a crushing proposition.  It so vastly transcends all our experience with ice and snow, or the experience of the race since the dawn of history, that only the scientific imagination and faith are equal to it.  The belief in it rests on indubitable evidence, its record is written all over our landscape, but it requires, I say, the scientific imagination to put the facts together and make a continuous history.

Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five or six hundred feet above tidewater, there is a bold rocky point upon which the old ice-sheet bore heavily.  It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do.  The great hand in this case moved from the northeast and must have fairly made this rocky prominence groan with its weight.  The surface, scratched and grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered away, leaving the rock quite rough; its general outlines alone tell the tale of the battle with the ice.  But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached and toppled over, turning topsy-turvy before it had weathered, and it lies in such a position, upheld by two rock fragments, that its glaciated surface, though protected from the weather, is clearly visible.  You step down two or three feet between the two upholding rocks and are at the entrance of a little cave, and there before you, standing at an angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page written over with the history of the passing of the great ice plane.  The surface exposed is ten or twelve feet long, and four or five feet wide, and it is as straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves are as sharp and distinct as if made yesterday.  I often take the college girls there who come to visit me, to show them, as I tell them, where the old ice gods left their signatures.  The girls take turns in stooping down and looking along the under surface of the rock, and feeling it with their hands, and marveling.  They have read or heard about these things, but the reading or hearing made little impression upon their minds.  When they see a concrete example, and feel it with their hands, they are impressed.  Then when I tell them that there is not a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one time two or three thousand feet thick above the place where they now stand, and that it bore down upon Julian’s Rock with a weight of thousands of tons to the square foot,