Abstract
IF one might venture to use the word “romantic” in reference to the history of any past geological period, it would certainly with most fitness be applied to that time, so recent and yet so remote, which we know as the Ice Age. The story of the old glaciers, like that of the living ones, has a perennial interest. We listen to it over and over again without wearying, much as we used to do with some of the standard tales of childhood. For even though we are now familiar with the evidence which proves that, at no very distant date, the northern parts of Europe and America, including nearly, if not the whole, of our own country, lay buried under a vast sheet of ice, the fact is so strange that every fresh presentation of it comes even yet before us with not a little of the charm of novelty. Hence every description of new facts which tends to elucidate the history of the Ice age in any one locality possesses a more than local interest and importance. More particularly is this the case when the description relates to Switzerland. The Swiss glaciers of to-day have become in a manner the common property and fighting-ground of the geologists of all countries; and all fresh observations which bear on the ancient extension of these glaciers are welcomed as additions to the common fund of geological knowledge.
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GEIKIE, A. The Ice Age in Switzerland*. Nature 2, 310–311 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/002310a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/002310a0