Both Lepidodendron and Sigillaria were anchored by means of great cablelike underground stems, which ran to long distances through the marshy ground. The trunks of both trees had a thick woody rind, inclosing loose cellular tissue and a pith. Their hollow stumps, filled with sand and mud, are common in the Coal Measures, and in them one sometimes finds leaves and stems, land shells, and the bones of little reptiles of the time which made their home there.
It is important to note that some of these gigantic lycopods, which are classed with the CRYPTOGAMS, or flowerless plants, had pith and medullary rays dividing their cylinders into woody wedges. These characters connect them with the PHANEROGAMS, or flowering plants. Like so many of the organisms of the remote past, they were connecting types from which groups now widely separated have diverged.
Gymnosperms, akin to the cycads, were also present in the Carboniferous forests. Such were the different species of CORDAITES, trees pyramidal in shape, with strap-shaped leaves and nutlike fruit. Other gymnosperms were related to the yews, and it was by these that many of the fossil nuts found in the Coal Measures were borne. It is thought by some that the gymnosperms had their station on the drier plains and higher lands.
The Carboniferous jungles extended over parts of Europe and of Asia, as well as eastern North America, and reached from the equator to within nine degrees of the north pole. Even in these widely separated regions the genera and species of coal plants are close akin and often identical.
INVERTEBRATES. Among the echinoderms, crinoids are now exceedingly abundant, sea urchins are more plentiful, and sea cucumbers are found now for the first time. Trilobites are rapidly declining, and pass away forever with the close of the period. Eurypterids are common; stinging scorpions are abundant; and here occur the first-known spiders.
We have seen that the arthropods were the first of all animals to conquer the realm of the air, the earliest insects appearing in the Ordovician. Insects had now become exceedingly abundant, and the Carboniferous forests swarmed with the ancestral types of dragon flies,–some with a spread of wing of more than two feet,– May flies, crickets, and locusts. Cockroaches infested the swamps, and one hundred and thirty-three species of this ancient order have been discovered in the Carboniferous of North America. The higher flower-loving insects are still absent; the reign of the flowering plants has not yet begun. The Paleozoic insects were generalized types connecting the present orders. Their fore wings were still membranous and delicately veined, and used in flying; they had not yet become thick, and useful only as wing covers, as in many of their descendants.
FISHES still held to the Devonian types, with the exception that the strange ostracoderms now had perished.
AMPHIBIANS. The vertebrates had now followed the arthropods and the mollusks upon the land, and had evolved a higher type adapted to the new environment. Amphibians–the class to which frogs and salamanders belong–now appear, with lungs for breathing air and with limbs for locomotion on the land. Most of the Carboniferous amphibians were shaped like the salamander, with weak limbs adapted more for crawling than for carrying the body well above the ground. Some legless, degenerate forms were snakelike in shape.
The earliest amphibians differ from those of to-day in a number of respects. They were connecting types linking together fishes, from which they were descended, with reptiles, of which they were the ancestors. They retained the evidence of their close relationship with the Devonian fishes in their cold blood, their gills and aquatic habit during their larval stage, their teeth with dentine infolded like those of the Devonian ganoids but still more intricately, and their biconcave vertebrae which never completely ossified. These, the highest vertebrates of the time, had not yet advanced beyond the embryonic stage of the more or less cartilaginous skeleton and the persistent notochord.
On the other hand, the skull of the Carboniferous amphibians was made of close-set bony plates, like the skull of the reptile, rather than like that of the frog, with its open spaces (Figs. 313 and 314). Unlike modern amphibians, with their slimy skin, the Carboniferous amphibians wore an armor of bony scales over the ventral surface and sometimes over the back as well.
It is interesting to notice from the footprints and skeletons of these earliest-known vertebrates of the land what was the primitive number of digits. The Carboniferous amphibians had five- toed feet, the primitive type of foot, from which their descendants of higher orders, with a smaller number of digits, have diverged.
The Carboniferous was the age of lycopods and amphibians, as the Devonian had been the age of rhizocarps and fishes.
LIFE OF THE PERMIAN. The close of the Paleozoic was, as we have seen, a time of marked physical changes. The upridging of the Appalachians had begun and a wide continental uplift–proved by the absence of Permian deposits over large areas where sedimentation had gone on before–opened new lands for settlement to hordes of air-breathing animals. Changes of climate compelled extensive migrations, and the fauna of different regions were thus brought into conflict. The Permian was a time of pronounced changes in plant and animal life, and a transitional period between two great eras. The somber forests of the earlier Carboniferous, with their gigantic club mosses, were now replaced by forests of cycads, tree ferns, and conifers. Even in the lower Permian the Lepidodendron and Sigillaria were very rare, and before the end of the epoch they and the Calamites also had become extinct. Gradually the antique types of the Paleozoic fauna died out, and in the Permian rocks are found the last survivors of the cystoid, the trilobite, and the eurypterid, and of many long-lived families of brachiopods, mollusks, and other invertebrates. The venerable Orthoceras and the Goniatite linger on through the epoch and into the first period of the succeeding era. Forerunners of the great ammonite family of cephalopod mollusks now appear. The antique forms of the earlier Carboniferous amphibians continue, but with many new genera and a marked increase in size.
A long forward step had now been taken in the evolution of the vertebrates. A new and higher type, the reptiles, had appeared, and in such numbers and variety are they found in the Permian strata that their advent may well have occurred in a still earlier epoch. It will be most convenient to describe the Permian reptiles along with their descendants of the Mesozoic.
CHAPTER XX
THE MESOZOIC
With the close of the Permian the world of animal and vegetable life had so changed that the line is drawn here which marks the end of the old order and the beginning of the new and separates the Paleozoic from the succeeding era,–the Mesozoic, the Middle Age of geological history. Although the Mesozoic era is shorter than the Paleozoic, as measured by the thickness of their strata, yet its duration must be reckoned in millions of years. Its predominant life features are the culmination and the beginning of the decline of reptiles, amphibians, cephalopod mollusks, and cycads, and the advent of marsupial mammals, birds, teleost fishes, and angiospermous plants. The leading events of the long ages of the era we can sketch only in the most summary way.
The Mesozoic comprises three systems,–the TRIASSIC, named from its threefold division in Germany; the JURASSIC, which is well displayed in the Jura Mountains; and the CRETACEOUS, which contains the extensive chalk (Latin, creta) deposits of Europe.
In eastern North America the Mesozoic rocks are much less important than the Paleozoic, for much of this portion of the continent was land during the Mesozoic era, and the area of the Mesozoic rocks is small. In western North America, on the other hand, the strata of the Mesozoic–and of the Cenozoic also–are widely spread. The Paleozoic rocks are buried quite generally from view except where the mountain makings and continental uplifts of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic have allowed profound erosion to bring them to light, as in deep canyons and about mountain axes. The record of many of the most important events in the development of the continent during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras is found in the rocks of our western states.
THE TRIASSIC AND JURASSIC
EASTERN NORTH AMERICA. The sedimentary record interrupted by the Appalachian deformation was not renewed in eastern North America until late in the Triassic. Hence during this long interval the land stood high, the coast was farther out than now, and over our Atlantic states geological time was recorded chiefly in erosion forms of hill and plain which have long since vanished. The area of the later Triassic rocks of this region, which take up again the geological record, is seen in the map of Figure 260. They lie on the upturned and eroded edges of the older rocks and occupy long troughs running for the most part parallel to the Atlantic coast. Evidently subsidence was in progress where these rocks were deposited. The eastern border of Appalachia was now depressed. The oldland was warping, and long belts of country lying parallel to the shore subsided, forming troughs in which thousands of feet of sediment now gathered.
These Triassic rocks, which are chiefly sandstones, hold no marine fossils, and hence were not laid in open arms of the sea. But their layers are often ripple-marked, and contain many tracks of reptiles, imprints of raindrops, and some fossil wood, while an occasional bed of shale is filled with the remains of fishes. We may conceive, then, of the Connecticut valley and the larger trough to the southwest as basins gradually sinking at a rate perhaps no faster than that of the New Jersey coast to-day, and as gradually aggraded by streams from the neighboring uplands. Their broad, sandy flats were overflowed by wandering streams, and when subsidence gained on deposition shallow lakes overspread the alluvial plains. Perhaps now and then the basins became long, brackish estuaries, whose low shores were swept by the incoming tide and were in turn left bare at its retreat to receive the rain prints of passing showers and the tracks of the troops of reptiles which inhabited these valleys.
The Triassic rocks are mainly red sandstones,–often feldspathic, or arkose, with some conglomerates and shales. Considering the large amount of feldspathic material in these rocks, do you infer that they were derived from the adjacent crystalline and metamorphic rocks of the oldland of Appalachia, or from the sedimentary Paleozoic rocks which had been folded into mountains during the Appalachian deformation? If from the former, was the drainage of the northern Appalachian mountain region then, as now, eastward and southeastward toward the Atlantic? The Triassic sandstones are voluminous, measuring at least a mile in thickness, and are largely of coarse waste. What do you infer as to the height of the lands from which the waste was shed, or the direction of the oscillation which they were then undergoing? In the southern basins, as about Richmond, Virginia, are valuable beds of coal; what was the physical geography of these areas when the coal was being formed?
Interbedded with the Triassic sandstones are contemporaneous lava beds which were fed from dikes. Volcanic action, which had been remarkably absent in eastern North America during Paleozoic times, was well-marked in connection with the warping now in progress. Thick intrusive sheets have also been driven in among the strata, as, for example, the sheet of the Palisades of the Hudson, described on page 269.
The present condition of the Triassic sandstones of the Connecticut valley is seen in Figure 315. Were the beds laid in their present attitude? What was the nature of the deformation which they have suffered? When did the intrusion of lava sheets take place relative to the deformation? What effect have these sheets on the present topography, and why? Assuming that the Triassic deformation went on more rapidly than denudation, what was its effect on the topography of the time? Are there any of its results remaining in the topography of to-day? Do the Triassic areas now stand higher or lower than the surrounding country, and why? How do the Triassic sandstones and shales compare in hardness with the igneous and metamorphic rocks about them? The Jurassic strata are wanting over the Triassic areas and over all of eastern North America. Was this region land or sea, an area of erosion or sedimentation, during the Jurassic period? In New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and farther southwest the lowest strata of the next period, the Cretaceous, rest on the eroded edges of the earlier rocks. The surface on which they lie is worn so even that we must believe that at the opening of the Cretaceous the oldland of Appalachia, including the Triassic areas, had been baseleveled at least near the coast. When, therefore, did the deformation of the Triassic rocks occur?
WESTERN NORTH AMERICA. Triassic strata infolded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains carry marine fossils and reach a thickness of nearly five thousand feet. California was then under water, and the site of the Sierra was a subsiding trough slowly filling with waste from the Great Basin land to the east.
Over a long belt which reaches from Wyoming across Colorado into New Mexico no Triassic sediments are found, nor is there any evidence that they were ever present; hence this area was high land suffering erosion during the Triassic. On each side of it, in eastern Colorado and about the Black Hills, in western Texas, in Utah, over the site of the Wasatch Mountains, and southward into Arizona over the plateaus trenched by the Colorado River, are large areas of Triassic rocks, sandstones chiefly, with some rock salt and gypsum. Fossils are very rare and none of them marine. Here, then, lay broad shallow lakes often salt, and warped basins, in which the waste of the adjacent uplands gathered. To this system belong the sandstones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, which later earth movements have upturned with the uplifted mountain flanks.
The Jurassic was marked with varied oscillations and wide changes in the outline of sea and land.
Jurassic shales of immense thickness–now metamorphosed into slates–are found infolded into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Hence during Jurassic times the Sierra trough continued to subside, and enormous deposits of mud were washed into it from the land lying to the east. Contemporaneous lava flows interbedded with the strata show that volcanic action accompanied the downwarp, and that molten rock was driven upward through fissures in the crust and outspread over the sea floor in sheets of lava.
THE SIERRA DEFORMATION. Ever since the middle of the Silurian, the Sierra trough had been sinking, though no doubt with halts and interruptions, until it contained nearly twenty-five thousand feet of sediment. At the close of the Jurassic it yielded to lateral pressure and the vast pile of strata was crumpled and upheaved into towering mountains. The Mesozoic muds were hardened and squeezed into slates. The rocks were wrenched and broken, and underground waters began the work of filling their fissures with gold-bearing quartz, which was yet to wait millions of years before the arrival of man to mine it. Immense bodies of molten rock were intruded into the crust as it suffered deformation, and these appear in the large areas of granite which the later denudation of the range has brought to light.
The same movements probably uplifted the rocks of the Coast Range in a chain of islands. The whole western part of the continent was raised and its seas and lakes were for the most part drained away.
THE BRITISH ISLES. The Triassic strata of the British Isles are continental, and include breccia beds of cemented talus, deposits of salt and gypsum, and sandstones whose rounded and polished grains are those of the wind-blown sands of deserts. In Triassic times the British Isles were part of a desert extending over much of northwestern Europe.
THE CRETACEOUS
The third great system of the Mesozoic includes many formations, marine and continental, which record a long and complicated history marked by great oscillations of the crust and wide changes in the outlines of sea and land.
EARLY CRETACEOUS. In eastern North America the lowest Cretaceous series comprises fresh-water formations which are traced from Nantucket across Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island, and through New Jersey southward into Georgia. They rest unconformably on the Triassic sandstones and the older rocks of the region. The Atlantic shore line was still farther out than now in the northern states. Again, as during the Triassic, a warping of the crust formed a long trough parallel to the coast and to the Appalachian ridges, but cut off from the sea; and here the continental deposits of the early Cretaceous were laid.
Along the Gulf of Mexico the same series was deposited under like conditions over the area known as the Mississippi embayment, reaching from Georgia northwestward into Tennessee and thence across into Arkansas and southward into Texas.
In the Southwest the subsidence continued until the transgressing sea covered most of Mexico and Texas and extended a gulf northward into Kansas. In its warm and quiet waters limestones accumulated to a depth of from one thousand to five thousand feet in Texas, and of more than ten thousand feet in Mexico. Meanwhile the lowlands, where the Great Plains are now, received continental deposits; coal swamps stretched from western Montana into British Columbia.
THE MIDDLE CRETACEOUS. This was a land epoch. The early Cretaceous sea retired from Texas and Mexico, for its sediments are overlain unconformably by formations of the Upper Cretaceous. So long was the time gap between the two series that no species found in the one occurs in the other.
THE UPPER CRETACEOUS. There now began one of the most remarkable events in all geological history,–the great Cretaceous subsidence. Its earlier warpings were recorded in continental deposits,–wide sheets of sandstone, shale, and some coal,–which were spread from Texas to British Columbia. These continental deposits are overlain by a succession of marine formations whose vast area is shown on the map, Figure 260. We may infer that as the depression of the continent continued the sea came in far and wide over the coast lands and the plains worn low during the previous epochs. Upper Cretaceous formations show that south of New England the waters of the Atlantic somewhat overlapped the crystalline rocks of the Piedmont Belt and spread their waste over the submerged coastal plain. The Gulf of Mexico again covered the Mississippi embayment, reaching as far north as southern Illinois, and extended over Texas.
A mediterranean sea now stretched from the Gulf to the arctic regions and from central Iowa to the eastern shore of the Great Basin land at about the longitude of Salt Lake City, the Colorado Mountains rising from it in a chain of islands. Along with minor oscillations there were laid in the interior sea various formations of sandstones, shales, and limestones, and from Kansas to South Dakota beds of white chalk show that the clear, warm waters swarmed at times with foraminiferal life whose disintegrating microscopic shells accumulated in this rare deposit.
At this epoch a wide sea, interrupted by various islands, stretched across Eurasia from Wales and western Spain to China, and spread southward over much of the Sahara. To the west its waters were clear and on its floor the crumbled remains of foraminifers gathered in heavy accumulations of calcareous ooze,– the white chalk of France and England. Sea urchins were also abundant, and sponges contributed their spicules to form nodules of flint.
THE LARAMIE. The closing stage of the Cretaceous was marked in North America by a slow uplift of the land. As the interior sea gradually withdrew, the warping basins of its floor were filled with waste from the rising lands about them, and over this wide area there were spread continental deposits in fresh-water lakes like the Great Lakes of the present, in brackish estuaries, and in river plains, while occasional oscillations now and again let in the sea. There were vast marshes in which there accumulated the larger part of the valuable coal seams of the West. The Laramie is the coal-bearing series of the West, as the Pennsylvanian is of the eastern part of our country.
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN DEFORMATION. At the close of the Cretaceous we enter upon an epoch of mountain-making far more extensive than any which the continent had witnessed. The long belt lying west of the ancient axes of the Colorado Islands and east of the Great Basin land had been an area of deposition for many ages, and in its subsiding troughs Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments had gathered to the depth of many thousand feet. And now from Mexico well-nigh to the Arctic Ocean this belt yielded to lateral pressure. The Cretaceous limestones of Mexico were folded into lofty mountains. A massive range was upfolded where the Wasatch Mountains now are, and various ranges of the Rockies in Colorado and other states were upridged. However slowly these deformations were effected they were no doubt accompanied by world-shaking earthquakes, and it is known that volcanic eruptions took place on a magnificent scale. Outflows of lava occurred along the Wasatch, the laccoliths of the Henry Mountains were formed, while the great masses of igneous rock which constitute the cores of the Spanish Peaks and other western mountains were thrust up amid the strata. The high plateaus from which many of these ranges rise had not yet been uplifted, and the bases of the mountains probably stood near the level of the sea.
North America was now well-nigh completed. The mediterranean seas which so often had occupied the heart of the land were done away with, and the continent stretched unbroken from the foot of the Sierras on the west to the Fall Line of the Atlantic coastal plain on the east.
THE MESOZOIC PENEPLAIN. The immense thickness of the Mesozoic formations conveys to our minds some idea of the vast length of time involved in the slow progress of its successive ages. The same lesson is taught as plainly by the amount of denudation which the lands suffered during the era.
The beginning of the Mesozoic saw a system of lofty mountain ranges stretching from New York into central Alabama. The end of this long era found here a wide peneplain crossed by sluggish wandering rivers and overlooked by detached hills as yet unreduced to the general level. The Mesozoic era was long enough for the Appalachian Mountains, upridged at its beginning, to have been weathered and worn away and carried grain by grain to the sea. The same plain extended over southern New England. The Taconic range, uplifted partially at least at the close of the Ordovician, and the block mountains of the Triassic, together with the pre- Cambrian mountains of ancient Appalachia, had now all been worn to a common level with the Allegheny ranges. The Mesozoic peneplain has been upwarped by later crustal movements and has suffered profound erosion, but the remnants of it which remain on the upland of southern New England and the even summits of the Allegheny ridges suffice to prove that it once existed. The age of the Mesozoic peneplain is determined from the fact that the lower Tertiary sediments were deposited on its even surface when at the close of the era the peneplain was depressed along its edges beneath the sea.
LIFE OF THE MESOZOIC
PLANT LIFE OF THE TRIASSIC AND JURASSIC. The Carboniferous forests of lepidodendrons and sigillafids had now vanished from the earth. The uplands were clothed with conifers, like the Araucarian pines of South America and Australia. Dense forests of tree ferns throve in moist regions, and canebrakes of horsetails of modern type, but with stems reaching four inches in thickness, bordered the lagoons and marshes. Cycads were exceedingly abundant. These gymnosperms, related to the pines and spruces in structure and fruiting, but palmlike in their foliage, and uncoiling their long leaves after the manner of ferns, culminated in the Jurassic. From the view point of the botanist the Mesozoic is the Age of Cycads, and after this era they gradually decline to the small number of species now existing in tropical latitudes.
PLANT LIFE OF THE CRETACEOUS. In the Lower Cretaceous the woodlands continued of much the same type as during the Jurassic. The forerunners now appeared of the modern dicotyls (plants with two seed leaves), and in the Middle Cretaceous the monocotyledonous group of palms came in. Palms are so like cycads that we may regard them as the descendants of some cycad type.
In the UPPER CRETACEOUS, cycads become rare. The highest types of flowering plants gain a complete ascendency, and forests of modern aspect cover the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Among the kinds of forest trees whose remains are found in the continental deposits of the Cretaceous are the magnolia, the myrtle, the laurel, the fig, the tulip tree, the chestnut, the oak, beech, elm, poplar, willow, birch, and maple. Forests of Eucalyptus grew along the coast of New England, and palms on the Pacific shores of British Columbia. Sequoias of many varieties ranged far into northern Canada. In northern Greenland there were luxuriant forests of magnolias, figs, and cycads; and a similar flora has been disinterred from the Cretaceous rocks of Alaska and Spitzbergen. Evidently the lands within the Arctic Circle enjoyed a warm and genial climate, as they had done during the Paleozoic. Greenland had the temperature of Cuba and southern Florida, and the time was yet far distant when it was to be wrapped in glacier ice.
INVERTEBRATES. During the long succession of the ages of the Mesozoic, with their vast geographical changes, there were many and great changes in organisms. Species were replaced again and again by others better fitted to the changing environment. During the Lower Cretaceous alone there were no less than six successive changes in the faunas which inhabited the limestone-making sea which then covered Texas. We shall disregard these changes for the most part in describing the life of the era, and shall confine our view to some of the most important advances made in the leading types.
Stromatopora have disappeared. Protozoans and sponges are exceedingly abundant, and all contribute to the making of Mesozoic strata. Corals have assumed a more modern type. Sea urchins have become plentiful; crinoids abound until the Cretaceous, where they begin their decline to their present humble station.
Trilobites and eurypterids are gone. Ten-footed crustaceans abound of the primitive long-tailed type (represented by the lobster and the crayfish), and in the Jurassic there appears the modern short- tailed type represented by the crabs. The latter type is higher in organization and now far more common. In its embryological development it passes through the long-tailed stage; connecting links in the Mesozoic also indicate that the younger type is the offshoot of the older.
Insects evolve along diverse lines, giving rise to beetles, ants, bees, and flies.
Brachiopods have dwindled greatly in the number of their species, while mollusks have correspondingly increased. The great oyster family dates from here.
Cephalopods are now to have their day. The archaic Orthoceras lingers on into the Triassic and becomes extinct, but a remarkable development is now at hand for the more highly organized descendants of this ancient line. We have noticed that in the Devonian the sutures of some of the chambered shells become angled, evolving the Goniatite type. The sutures now become lobed and corrugated in Ceratites. The process was carried still farther, and the sutures were elaborately frilled in the great order of the Ammonites. It was in the Jurassic that the Ammonites reached their height. No fossils are more abundant or characteristic of their age. Great banks of their shells formed beds of limestone in warm seas the world over.
The ammonite stem branched into a most luxuriant variety of forms. The typical form was closely coiled like a nautilus. In others the coil was more or less open, or even erected into a spiral. Some were hook-shaped, and there were members of the order in which the shell was straight, and yet retained all the internal structures of its kind. At the end of the Mesozoic the entire tribe of ammonites became extinct.
The Belemnite (Greek, belemnon, a dart) is a distinctly higher type of cephalopod which appeared in the Triassic, became numerous and varied in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and died out early in the Tertiary. Like the squids and cuttlefish, of which it was the prototype, it had an internal calcareous shell. This consisted of a chambered and siphuncled cone, whose point was sheathed in a long solid guard somewhat like a dart. The animal carried an ink sac, and no doubt used it as that of the modern cuttlefish is used,–to darken the water and make easy an escape from foes. Belemnites have sometimes been sketched with fossil sepia, or india ink, from their own ink sacs. In the belemnites and their descendants, the squids and cuttlefish, the cephalopods made the radical change from external to the internal shell. They abandoned the defensive system of warfare and boldly took up the offensive. No doubt, like their descendants, the belemnites were exceedingly active and voracious creatures.
FISHES AND AMPHIBIANS. In the Triassic and Jurassic, little progress was made among the fishes, and the ganoid was still the leading type. In the Cretaceous the teleosts, or bony fishes, made their appearance, while ganoids declined toward their present subordinate place.
The amphibians culminated in the Triassic, some being formidable creatures as large as alligators. They were still of the primitive Paleozoic types. Their pygmy descendants of more modern types are not found until later, salamanders appearing first in the Cretaceous, and frogs at the beginning of the Cenozoic.
No remains of amphibians have been discovered in the Jurassic. Do you infer from this that there were none in existence at that time?
REPTILES OF THE MESOZOIC
The great order of Reptiles made its advent in the Permian, culminated in the Triassic and Jurassic, and began to decline in the Cretaceous. The advance from the amphibian to the reptile was a long forward step in the evolution of the vertebrates. In the reptile the vertebrate skeleton now became completely ossified. Gills were abandoned and breathing was by lungs alone. The development of the individual from the egg to maturity was uninterrupted by any metamorphosis, such as that of the frog when it passes from the tadpole stage. Yet in advancing from the amphibian to the reptile the evolution of the vertebrate was far from finished. The cold-blooded, clumsy and sluggish, small- brained and unintelligent reptile is as far inferior to the higher mammals, whose day was still to come, as it is superior to the amphibian and the fish.
The reptiles of the Permian, the earliest known, were much like lizards in form of body. Constituting a transition type between the amphibians on the one hand, and both the higher reptiles and the mammals on the other, they retained the archaic biconcave vertebra of the fish and in some cases the persistent notochord, while some of them, the theromorphs, possessed characters allying them with mammals. In these the skull was remarkably similar to that of the carnivores, or flesh-eating mammals, and the teeth, unlike the teeth of any later reptiles, were divisible into incisors, canines, and molars, as are the teeth of mammals.
At the opening of the Mesozoic era reptiles were the most highly organized and powerful of any animals on the earth. New ranges of continental extent were opened to them, food was abundant, the climate was congenial, and they now branched into very many diverse types which occupied and ruled all fields,–the land, the air, and the sea. The Mesozoic was the Age of Reptiles.
THE ANCESTRY OF SURVIVING REPTILIAN TYPES. We will consider first the evolution of the few reptilian types which have survived to the present.
Crocodiles, the highest of existing reptiles, are a very ancient order, dating back to the lower Jurassic, and traceable to earlier ancestral, generalized forms, from which sprang several other orders also.
Turtles and tortoises are not found until the early Jurassic, when they already possessed the peculiar characteristics which set them off so sharply from other reptiles. They seem to have lived at first in shallow water and in swamps, and it is not until after the end of the Mesozoic that some of the order became adapted to life on the land.
The largest of all known turtles, Archelon, whose home was the great interior Cretaceous sea, was fully a dozen feet in length and must have weighed at least two tons. The skull alone is a yard long.
Lizards and snakes do not appear until after the close of the Mesozoic, although their ancestral lines may be followed back into the Cretaceous.
We will now describe some of the highly specialized orders peculiar to the Mesozoic.
LAND REPTILES. The DINOSAURS (terrible reptiles) are an extremely varied order which were masters of the land from the late Trias until the close of the Mesozoic era. Some were far larger than elephants, some were as small as cats; some walked on all fours, some were bipedal; some fed on the luxuriant tropical foliage, and others on the flesh of weaker reptiles. They may be classed in three divisions,–the FLESH-EATING DINOSAURS, the REPTILE-FOOTED DINOSAURS, and the BEAKED DINOSAURS,–the latter two divisions being herbivorous.
The FLESH-EATING DINOSAURS are the oldest known division of the order, and their characteristics are shown in Figure 329. As a class, reptiles are egg layers (oviparous); but some of the flesh- eating dinosaurs are known to have been VIVIPAROUS, i.e. to have brought forth their young alive. This group was the longest-lived of any of the three, beginning in the Trias and continuing to the close of the Mesozoic era.
Contrast the small fore limbs, used only for grasping, with the powerful hind limbs on which the animal stalked about. Some of the species of this group seem to have been able to progress by leaping in kangaroo fashion. Notice the sharp claws, the ponderous tail, and the skull set at right angles with the spinal column. The limb bones are hollow. The ceratosaurs reached a length of some fifteen feet, and were not uncommon in Colorado and the western lands in Jurassic times.
The REPTILE-FOOTED DINOSAURS (Sauropoda) include some of the biggest brutes which ever trod the ground. One of the largest, whose remains are found entombed in the Jurassic rocks of Wyoming and Colorado, is shown in Figure 330.
Note the five digits on the hind feet, the quadrupedal gait, the enormous stretch of neck and tail, the small head aligned with the vertebral column. Diplodocus was fully sixty-five feet long and must have weighed about twenty tons. The thigh bones of the Sauropoda are the largest bones which ever grew. That of a genus allied to the Diplodocus measures six feet and eight inches, and the total length of the animal must have been not far from eighty feet, the largest land animal known.
The Sauropoda became extinct when their haunts along the rivers and lakes of the western plains of Jurassic times were invaded by the Cretaceous interior sea.
The BEAKED DINOSAURS(Predentata) were distinguished by a beak sheathed with horn carried in front of the tooth-set jaw, and used, we may imagine, in stripping the leaves and twigs of trees and shrubs. We may notice only two of the most interesting types.
STEGOSAURUS (plated reptile) takes its name from the double row of bony plates arranged along its back. The powerful tail was armed with long spines, and the thick skin was defended with irregular bits of bone implanted in it. The brain of the stegosaur was smaller than that of any land vertebrate, while in the sacrum the nerve canal was enlarged to ten times the capacity of the brain cavity of the skull. Despite their feeble wits, this well-armored family lived on through millions of years which intervened between their appearance, at the opening of the Jurassic, and the close of the Cretaceous, when they became extinct.
A less stupid brute than the stegosaur was TRICERATOPS, the dinosaur of the three horns,–one horn carried on the nose, and a massive pair set over the eyes. Note the enormous wedge-shaped skull, with its sharp beak, and the hood behind resembling a fireman’s helmet. Triceratops was fully twenty-five feet long, and of twice the bulk of an elephant. The family appeared in the Upper Cretaceous and became extinct at its close. Their bones are found buried in the fresh-water deposits of the time from Colorado to Montana and eastward to the Dakotas.
MARINE REPTILES. In the ocean, reptiles occupied the place now held by the aquatic mammals, such as whales and dolphins, and their form and structure were similarly modified to suit their environment. In the Ichthyosaurus (fish reptile), for example, the body was fishlike in form, with short neck and large, pointed head (Fig. 333).
A powerful tail, whose flukes were set vertical, and the lower one of which was vertebrated, served as propeller, while a large dorsal fin was developed as a cutwater. The primitive biconcave vertebrae of the fish and of the early land vertebrates were retained, and the limbs degenerated into short paddles. The skin of the ichthyosaur was smooth like that of a whale, and its food was largely fish and cephalopods, as the fossil contents of its stomach prove.
These sea monsters disported along the Pacific shore over northern California in Triassic times, and the bones of immense members of the family occur in the Jurassic strata of Wyoming. Like whales and seals, the ichthyosaurs were descended from land vertebrates which had become adapted to a marine habitat.
PLESIOSAURS were another order which ranged throughout the Mesozoic. Descended from small amphibious animals, they later included great marine reptiles, characterized in the typical genus by long neck, snakelike head, and immense paddles. They swam in the Cretaceous interior sea of western North America.
MOSASAURS belong to the same order as do snakes and lizards, and are an offshoot of the same ancestral line of land reptiles. These snakelike creatures–which measured as much as forty-five feet in length–abounded in the Cretaceous seas. They had large conical teeth, and their limbs had become stout paddles.
The lower jaw of the mosasaur was jointed; the quadrate bone, which in all reptiles connects the bone of the lower jaw with the skull, was movable, and as in snakes the lower jaw could be used in thrusting prey down the throat. The family became extinct at the end of the Mesozoic, and left no descendants. One may imitate the movement of the lower jaw of the mosasaur by extending the arms, clasping the hands, and bending the elbows.
FLYING REPTILES. The atmosphere, which had hitherto been tenanted only by insects, was first conquered by the vertebrates in the Mesozoic. Pterosaurs, winged reptiles, whose whole organism was adapted for flight through the air, appeared in the Jurassic and passed off the stage of existence before the end of the Cretaceous. The bones were hollow, as are those of birds. The sternum, or breastbone, was given a keel for the attachment of the wing muscles. The fifth finger, prodigiously lengthened, was turned backward to support a membrane which was attached to the body and extended to the base of the tail. The other fingers were free, and armed with sharp and delicate claws, as shown in Figures 336 and 337.
These “dragons of the air” varied greatly in size; some were as small as sparrows, while others surpassed in stretch of wing the largest birds of the present day. They may be divided into two groups. The earliest group comprises genera with jaws set with teeth, and with long tails sometimes provided with a rudderlike expansion at the end. In their successors of the later group the tail had become short, and in some of the genera the teeth had disappeared. Among the latest of the flying reptiles was ORNITHOSTOMA (bird beak), the largest creature which ever flew, and whose remains are imbedded in the offshore deposits of the Cretaceous sea which held sway over our western plains. Ornithostoma’s spread of wings was twenty feet. Its bones were a marvel of lightness, the entire skeleton, even in its petrified condition, not weighing more than five or six pounds. The sharp beak, a yard long, was toothless and bird-like, as its name suggests
BIRDS. The earliest known birds are found in the Jurassic, and during the remainder of the Mesozoic they contended with the flying reptiles for the empire of the air. The first feathered creatures were very different from the birds of to-day. Their characteristics prove them an offshoot of the dinosaur line of reptiles. ARCHAEOPTERYX (ANCIENT BIRD) (Fig. 338) exhibits a strange mingling of bird and reptile. Like birds, it was fledged with perfect feathers, at least on wings and tail, but it retained the teeth of the reptile, and its long tail was vertebrated, a pair of feathers springing from each joint. Throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous the remains of birds are far less common than those of flying reptiles, and strata representing hundreds of thousands of years intervene between Archaeopteryx and the next birds of which we know, whose skeletons occur in the Cretaceous beds of western Kansas.
MAMMALS. So far as the entries upon the geological record show, mammals made their advent in a very humble way during the Trias. These earliest of vertebrates which suckle their young were no bigger than young kittens, and their strong affinities with the theromorphs suggest that their ancestors are to be found among some generalized types of that order of reptiles.
During the long ages of the Mesozoic, mammals continued small and few, and were completely dominated by the reptiles. Their remains are exceedingly rare, and consist of minute scattered teeth,–with an occasional detached jaw,–which prove them to have been flesh or insect eaters. In the same way their affinities are seen to be with the lowest of mammals,–the MONOTREMES and MARSUPIALS. The monotremes,–such as the duckbill mole and the spiny ant-eater of Australia, reproduce by means of eggs resembling those of reptiles; the marsupials, such as the opossum and the kangaroo, bring forth their young alive, but in a very immature condition, and carry them for some time after birth in the marsupium, a pouch on the ventral side of the body.
CHAPTER XXI
THE TERTIARY
THE CENOZOIC ERA. The last stages of the Cretaceous are marked by a decadence of the reptiles. By the end of that period the reptilian forms characteristic of the time had become extinct one after another, leaving to represent the class only the types of reptiles which continue to modern times. The day of the ammonite and the belemnite also now drew to a close, and only a few of these cephalopods were left to survive the period. It is therefore at the close of the Cretaceous that the line is drawn which marks the end of the Middle Age of geology and the beginning of the Cenozoic era, the era of modern life,–the Age of Mammals.
In place of the giant reptiles, mammals now become masters of the land, appearing first in generalized types which, during the long ages of the era, gradually evolve to higher forms, more specialized and ever more closely resembling the mammals of the present. In the atmosphere the flying dragons of the Mesozoic give place to birds and bats. In the sea, whales, sharks, and teleost fishes of modern types rule in the stead of huge swimming reptiles. The lower vertebrates, the invertebrates of land and sea, and the plants of field and forest take on a modern aspect, and differ little more from those of to-day than the plants and animals of different countries now differ from one another. From the beginning of the Cenozoic era until now there is a steadily increasing number of species of animals and plants which have continued to exist to the present time.
The Cenozoic era comprises two divisions,–the TERTIARY period and the QUATERNARY period.
In the early days of geology the formations of the entire geological record, so far as it was then known, were divided into three groups,–the PRIMARY, the SECONDARY (now known as the Mesozoic), and the TERTIARY, When the third group was subdivided into two systems, the term Tertiary was retained for the first system of the two, while the term QUATERNARY was used to designate the second.
DIVISIONS OF THE TERTIARY. The formations of the Tertiary are grouped in three divisions,–the PLIOCENE (more recent), the MIOCENE (less recent), and the EOCENE (the dawn of the recent). Each of these epochs is long and complex. Their various sub- divisions are distinguished each by its own peculiar organisms, and the changes of physical geography recorded in their strata. In the rapid view which we are compelled to take we can note only a few of the most conspicuous events of the period.
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE TERTIARY IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA. The Tertiary rocks of eastern North America are marine deposits and occupy the coastal lowlands of the Atlantic and Gulf states (Fig. 260). In New England, Tertiary beds occur on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, but not on the mainland; hence the shore line here stood somewhat farther out than now. From New Jersey southward the earliest Tertiary sands and clays, still unconsolidated, leave only a narrow strip of the edge of the Cretaceous between them and the Triassic and crystalline rocks of the Piedmont oldland; hence the Atlantic shore here stood farther in than now, and at the beginning of the period the present coastal plain was continental delta. A broad belt of Tertiary sea- laid limestones, sandstones, and shales surrounds the Gulf of Mexico and extends northward up the Mississippi embayment to the mouth of the Ohio River; hence the Gulf was then larger than at present, and its waters reached in a broad bay far up the Mississippi valley.
Along the Atlantic coast the Mesozoic peneplain may be traced shoreward to where it disappears from view beneath an unconformable cover of early Tertiary marine strata. The beginning of the Tertiary was therefore marked by a subsidence. The wide erosion surface which at the close of the Mesozoic lay near sea level where the Appalachian Mountains and their neighboring plateaus and uplands now stand was lowered gently along its seaward edge beneath the Tertiary Atlantic to receive a cover of its sediments.
As the period progressed slight oscillations occurred from time to time. Strips of coastal plain were added to the land, and as early as the close of the Miocene the shore lines of the Atlantic and Gulf states had reached well-nigh their present place. Louisiana and Florida were the last areas to emerge wholly from the sea,– Florida being formed by a broad transverse upwarp of the continental delta at the opening of the Miocene, forming first an island, which afterwards was joined to the mainland.
THE PACIFIC COAST. Tertiary deposits with marine fossils occur along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and are crumpled among the mountain masses of the Coast Ranges; it is hence inferred that the Great Valley of California was then a border sea, separated from the ocean by a chain of mountainous islands which were upridged into the Coast Ranges at a still later time. Tertiary marine strata are spread over the lower Columbia valley and that of Puget Sound, showing that the Pacific came in broadly there.
THE INTERIOR OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. The closing stages of the Mesozoic were marked, as we have seen, by the upheaval of the Rocky Mountains and other western ranges. The bases of the mountains are now skirted by widespread Tertiary deposits, which form the highest strata of the lofty plateaus from the level of whose summits the mountains rise. Like the recent alluvium of the Great Valley of California, these deposits imply low-lying lands when they were laid, and therefore at that time the mountains rose from near sea level. But the height at which the Tertiary strata now stand–five thousand feet above the sea at Denver, and twice that height in the plateaus of southern Utah–proves that the plateaus of which the Tertiary strata form a part have been uplifted during the Cenozoic. During their uplift, warping formed extensive basins both east and west of the Rockies, and in these basins stream-swept and lake-laid waste gathered to depths of hundreds and thousands of feet, as it is accumulating at present in the Great Valley of California and on the river plains of Turkestan. The Tertiary river deposits of the High Plains have already been described. How widespread are these ancient river plains and beds of fresh-water lakes may be seen in the map of Figure 260.
THE BAD LANDS. In several of the western states large areas of Tertiary fresh-water deposits have been dissected to a maze of hills whose steep sides are cut with innumerable ravines. The deposits of these ancient river plains and lake beds are little cemented and because of the dryness of the climate are unprotected by vegetation; hence they are easily carved by the wet-weather rills of scanty and infrequent rains. These waterless, rugged surfaces were named by the early French explorers the BAD LANDS because they were found so difficult to traverse. The strata of the Bad Lands contain vast numbers of the remains of the animals of Tertiary times, and the large amount of barren surface exposed to view makes search for fossils easy and fruitful. These desolate tracts are therefore frequently visited by scientific collecting expeditions.
MOUNTAIN MAKING IN THE TERTIARY. The Tertiary period included epochs when the earth’s crust was singularly unquiet. From time to time on all the continents subterranean forces gathered head, and the crust was bent and broken and upridged in lofty mountains.
The Sierra Nevada range was formed, as we have seen, by strata crumpling at the end of the Jurassic. But since that remote time the upfolded mountains had been worn to plains and hilly uplands, the remnants of whose uplifted erosion surfaces may now be traced along the western mountain slopes. Beginning late in the Tertiary, the region was again affected by mountain-making movements. A series of displacements along a profound fault on the eastern side tilted the enormous earth block of the Sierras to the west, lifting its eastern edge to form the lofty crest and giving to the range a steep eastern front and a gentle descent toward the Pacific.
The Coast Ranges also have had a complex history with many vicissitudes. The earliest foldings of their strata belong to the close of the Jurassic, but it was not until the end of the Miocene that the line of mountainous islands and the heavy sediments which had been deposited on their submerged flanks were crushed into a continuous mountain chain. Thick Pliocene beds upon their sides prove that they were depressed to near sea level during the later Tertiary. At the close of the Pliocene the Coast Ranges rose along with the upheaval of the Sierra, and their gradual uplift has continued to the present time.
The numerous north-south ranges of the Great Basin and the Mount Saint Elias range of Alaska were also uptilted during the Tertiary.
During the Tertiary period many of the loftiest mountains of the earth–the Alps, the Apennines, the Pyrenees, the Atlas, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas–received the uplift to which they owe most of their colossal bulk and height, as portions of the Tertiary sea beds now found high upon their flanks attest. In the Himalayas, Tertiary marine limestones occur sixteen thousand five hundred feet above sea level.
VOLCANIC ACTIVITY IN THE TERTIARY. The vast deformations of the Tertiary were accompanied on a corresponding scale by outpourings of lava, the outburst of volcanoes, and the intrusion of molten masses within the crust. In the Sierra Nevadas the Miocene river gravels of the valleys of the western slope, with their placer deposits of gold, were buried beneath streams of lava and beds of tuff. Volcanoes broke forth along the Rocky Mountains and on the plateaus of Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Mount Shasta and the immense volcanic piles of the Cascades date from this period. The mountain basin of the Yellowstone Park was filled to a depth of several thousand feet with tuffs and lavas, the oldest dating as far back as the beginning of the Tertiary. Crandall volcano was reared in the Miocene and the latest eruptions of the Park are far more recent.
THE COLUMBIA AND SNAKE RIVER LAVAS. Still more important is the plateau of lava, more than two hundred thousand square miles in area, extending from the Yellowstone Park to the Cascade Mountains, which has been built from Miocene times to the present.
Over this plateau, which occupies large portions of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, and extends into northern California and Nevada, the country rock is basaltic lava. For thousands of square miles the surface is a lava plain which meets the boundary mountains as a lake or sea meets a rugged and deeply indented coast. The floods of molten rock spread up the mountain valleys for a score of miles and more, the intervening spurs rising above the lava like long peninsulas, while here and there an isolated peak was left to tower above the inundation like an island off a submerged shore.
The rivers which drain the plateau–the Snake, the Columbia, and their tributaries–have deeply trenched it, yet their canyons, which reach the depth of several thousand feet, have not been worn to the base of the lava except near the margin and where they cut the summits of mountains drowned beneath the flood. Here and there the plateau has been deformed. It has been upbent into great folds, and broken into immense blocks of bedded lava, forming mountain ranges, which run parallel with the Pacific coast line. On the edges of these tilted blocks the thickness of the lava is seen to be fully five thousand feet. The plateau has been built, like that of Iceland, of innumerable overlapping sheets of lava. On the canyon walls they weather back in horizontal terraces and long talus slopes. One may distinguish each successive flow by its dense central portion, often jointed with large vertical columns, and the upper portion with its mass of confused irregular columns and scoriaceous surface. The average thickness of the flows seems to be about seventy-five feet.
The plateau was long in building. Between the layers are found in places old soil beds and forest grounds and the sediments of lakes. Hence the interval between the flows in any locality was sometimes long enough for clays to gather in the lakes which filled depressions in the surface. Again and again the surface of the black basalt was reddened by oxidation and decayed to soil, and forests had time to grow upon it before the succeeding inundation sealed the sediments and soils away beneath a sheet of stone. Near the edges of the lava plain, rivers from the surrounding mountains spread sheets of sand and gravel on the surface of one flow after another. These pervious sands, interbedded with the lava, become the aquifers of artesian wells.
In places the lavas rest on extensive lake deposits, one thousand feet deep, and Miocene in age as their fossils prove. It is to the middle Tertiary, then, that the earliest flows and the largest bulk of the great inundation belong. So ancient are the latest floods in the Columbia basin that they have weathered to a residual yellow clay from thirty to sixty feet in depth and marvelously rich in the mineral substances on which plants feed.
In the Snake River valley the latest lavas are much younger. Their surfaces are so fresh and undecayed that here the effusive eruptions may well have continued to within the period of human history. Low lava domes like those of Iceland mark where last the basalt outwelled and spread far and wide before it chilled (Fig. 341). In places small mounds of scoria show that the eruptions were accompanied to a slight degree by explosions of steam. So fluid was this superheated lava that recent flows have been traced for more than fifty miles.
The rocks underlying the Columbia lavas, where exposed to view, are seen to be cut by numerous great dikes of dense basalt, which mark the fissures through which the molten rock rose to the surface.
The Tertiary included times of widespread and intense volcanic action in other continents as well as in North America. In Europe, Vesuvius and Etna began their career as submarine volcanoes in connection with earth movements which finally lifted Pliocene deposits in Sicily to their present height,–four thousand feet above the sea. Volcanoes broke forth in central France and southern Germany, in Hungary and the Carpathians. Innumerable fissures opened in the crust from the north of Ireland and the western islands of Scotland to the Faroes, Iceland, and even to arctic Greenland; and here great plateaus were built of flows of basalt similar to that of the Columbia River. In India, at the opening of the Tertiary, there had been an outwelling of basalt, flooding to a depth of thousands of feet two hundred thousand square miles of the northwestern part of the peninsula, and similar inundations of lava occurred where are now the table-lands of Abyssinia. From the middle Tertiary on, Asia Minor, Arabia, and Persia were the scenes of volcanic action. In Palestine the rise of the uplands of Judea at the close of the Eocene, and the downfaulting of the Jordan valley were followed by volcanic outbursts. In comparison with the middle Tertiary, the present is a time of volcanic inactivity and repose.
EROSION OF TERTIARY MOUNTAINS AND PLATEAUS. The mountains and plateaus built at various times during the Tertiary and at its commencement have been profoundly carved by erosive agents. The Sierra Nevada Mountains have been dissected on the western slope by such canyons as those of King’s River and the Yosemite. Six miles of strata have been denuded from parts of the Wasatch Mountains since their rise at the beginning of the era. From the Colorado plateaus, whose uplift dates from the same time, there have been stripped off ten thousand feet of strata over thousands of square miles, and the colossal canyon of the Colorado has been cut after this great denudation had been mostly accomplished.
On the eastern side of the continent, as we have seen, a broad peneplain had been developed by the close of the Cretaceous. The remnants of this old erosion surface are now found upwarped to various heights in different portions of its area. In southern New England it now stands fifteen hundred feet above the sea in western Massachusetts, declining thence southward and eastward to sea level at the coast. In southwestern Virginia it has been lifted to four thousand feet above the sea. Manifestly this upwarp occurred since the peneplain was formed; it is later than the Mesozoic, and the vast dissection which the peneplain has suffered since its uplift must belong to the successive cycles of Cenozoic time.
Revived by the uplift, the streams of the area trenched it as deeply as its elevation permitted, and reaching grade, opened up wide valleys and new peneplains in the softer rocks. The Connecticut valley is Tertiary in age, and in the weak Triassic sandstones has been widened in places to fifteen miles. Dating from the same time are the valleys of the Hudson, the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Potomac, and the Shenandoah.
In Pennsylvania and the states lying to the south the Mesozoic peneplain lies along the summits of the mountain ridges. On the surface of this ancient plain, Tertiary erosion etched out the beautifully regular pattern of the Allegheny mountain ridges and their intervening valleys. The weaker strata of the long, regular folds were eroded into longitudinal valleys, while the hard Paleozoic sandstones, such as the Medina and the Pocono, were left in relief as bold mountain walls whose even crests rise to the common level of the ancient plain. From Virginia far into Alabama the great Appalachian valley was opened to a width in places of fifty miles and more, along a belt of intensely folded and faulted strata where once was the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. In Figure 70 the summit of the Cumberland plateau (ab) marks the level of the Mesozoic peneplain, while the lower erosion levels are Tertiary and Quaternary in age.
LIFE OF THE TERTIARY PERIOD
VEGETATION AND CLIMATE. The highest plants in structure, the DICOTYLS (such as our deciduous forest trees) and the MONOCOTYLS (represented by the palms), were introduced during the Cretaceous. The vegetable kingdom reached its culmination before the animal kingdom, and if the dividing line between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic were drawn according to the progress of plant life, the Cretaceous instead of the Tertiary would be made the opening period of the modern era.
The plants of the Tertiary belonged, for the most part, to genera now living; but their distribution was very different from that of the flora of to-day. In the earlier Tertiary, palms flourished over northern Europe, and in the northwestern United States grew the magnolia and laurel, along with the walnut, oak, and elm. Even in northern Greenland and in Spitzbergen there were lakes covered with water lilies and surrounded by forests of maples, poplars, limes, the cypress of our southern states, and noble sequoias similar to the “big trees” and redwoods of California. A warm climate like that of the Mesozoic, therefore, prevailed over North America and Europe, extending far toward the pole. In the later Tertiary the climate gradually became cooler. Palms disappeared from Europe, and everywhere the aspect of forests and open lands became more like that of to-day. Grasses became abundant, furnishing a new food for herbivorous animals.
ANIMAL LIFE OF THE TERTIARY. Little needs to be said of the Tertiary invertebrates, so nearly were they like the invertebrates of the present. Even in the Eocene, about five per cent of marine shells were of species still living, and in the Pliocene the proportion had risen to more than one half.
Fishes were of modern types. Teleosts were now abundant. The ocean teemed with sharks, some of them being voracious monsters seventy- five feet and even more in length, with a gape of jaw of six feet, as estimated by the size of their enormous sharp-edged teeth.
Snakes are found for the first time in the early Tertiary. These limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be distinguished from those of the present day.
MAMMALS OF THE EARLY TERTIARY. The fossils of continental deposits of the earliest Eocene show that a marked advance had now been made in the evolution of the Mammalia. The higher mammals had appeared, and henceforth the lower mammals–the monotremes and the marsupials–are reduced to a subordinate place.
These first true mammals were archaic and generalized in structure. Their feet were of the primitive type, with five toes of about equal length. They were also PLANTIGRADES,–that is, they touched the ground with the sole of the entire foot from toe to heel. No foot had yet become adapted to swift running by a decrease in the number of digits and by lifting the heel and sole so that only the toes touch the ground,–a tread called DIGITIGRADE. Nor was there yet any foot like that of the cats, with sharp retractile claws adapted to seizing and tearing the prey. The forearm and the lower leg each had still two separate bones (ulna and radius, fibula and tibia), neither pair having been replaced with a single strong bone, as in the leg of the horse. The teeth also were primitive in type and of full number. The complex heavy grinders of the horse and elephant, the sharp cutting teeth of the carnivores, and the cropping teeth of the grass eaters were all still to come.
Phenacodus is a characteristic genus of the early Eocene, whose species varied in size from that of a bulldog to that of an animal a little larger than a sheep. Its feet were primitive, and their five toes bore nails intermediate in form between a claw and a hoof. The archaic type of teeth indicates that the animal was omnivorous in diet. A cast of the brain cavity shows that, like its associates of the time, its brain was extremely small and nearly smooth, having little more than traces of convolutions.
The long ages of the Eocene and the following epochs of the Tertiary were times of comparatively rapid evolution among the Mammalia. The earliest forms evolved along diverging lines toward the various specialized types of hoofed mammals, rodents, carnivores, proboscidians, the primates, and the other mammalian orders as we know them now. We must describe the Tertiary mammals very briefly, tracing the lines of descent of only a few of the more familiar mammals of the present.
THE HORSE. The pedigree of the horse runs back into the early Eocene through many genera and species to a five-toed, [Footnote: Or, more accurately, with four perfect toes and a rudimentary fifth corresponding to the thumb.] short-legged ancestor little bigger than a cat. Its descendants gradually increased in stature and became better and better adapted to swift running to escape their foes. The leg became longer, and only the tip of the toes struck the ground. The middle toe (digit number three), originally the longest of the five, steadily enlarged, while the remaining digits dwindled and disappeared. The inner digit, corresponding to the great toe and thumb, was the first to go. Next number five, the little finger, was also dropped. By the end of the Eocene a three-toed genus of the horse family had appeared, as large as a sheep. The hoof of digit number three now supported most of the weight, but the slender hoofs of digits two and four were still serviceable. In the Miocene the stature of the ancestors of the horse increased to that of a pony. The feet were still three-toed, but the side hoofs were now mere dewclaws and scarcely touched the ground. The evolution of the family was completed in the Pliocene.
The middle toe was enlarged still more, the side toes were dropped, and the palm and foot bones which supported them were reduced to splints.
While these changes were in progress the radius and ulna of the fore limb became consolidated to a single bone; and in the hind limb the fibula dwindled to a splint, while the tibia was correspondingly enlarged. The molars, also gradually lengthened, and became more and more complex on their grinding surface; the neck became longer; the brain steadily increased in size and its convolutions became more abundant. The evolution of the horse has made for greater fleetness and intelligence.
THE RHINOCEROS AND TAPIR. These animals, which are grouped with the horse among the ODD-TOED (perissodactyl) mammals, are now verging toward extinction. In the rhinoceros, evolution seems to have taken the opposite course from that of the horse. As the animal increased in size it became more clumsy, its limbs became shorter and more massive, and, perhaps because of its great weight, the number of digits were not reduced below the number three. Like other large herbivores, the rhinoceros, too slow to escape its enemies by flight, learned to withstand them. It developed as its means of defense a nasal horn.
Peculiar offshoots of the line appeared at various times in the Tertiary. A rhinoceros, semiaquatic in habits, with curved tusks, resembling in aspect the hippopotamus, lived along the water courses of the plains east of the Rockies, and its bones are now found by the thousands in the Miocene of Kansas. Another developed along a line parallel to that of the horse, and herds of these light-limbed and swift-footed running rhinoceroses ranged the Great Plains from the Dakotas southward.
The tapirs are an ancient family which has changed but little since it separated from the other perissodactyl stocks in the early Tertiary. At present, tapirs are found only in South America and southern Asia,–a remarkable distribution which we could not explain were it not that the geological record shows that during Tertiary times tapirs ranged throughout the northern hemisphere, making their way to South America late in that period. During the Pleistocene they became extinct over all the intervening lands between the widely separated regions where now they live. The geographic distribution of animals, as well as their relationships and origins, can be understood only through a study of their geological history.
THE PROBOSCIDIANS. This unique order of hoofed mammals, of which the elephant is the sole survivor, began, so far as known, in the Eocene, in Egypt, with a piglike ancestor the size of a small horse, with cheek teeth like the Mastodon’s, but wanting both trunk and tusks. A proboscidian came next with four short tusks, and in the Miocene there followed a Mastodon (Fig. 346) armed with two pairs of long, straight tusks on which rested a flexible proboscis.
The DINOTHERE was a curious offshoot of the line, which developed in the Miocene in Europe. In this immense proboscidian, whose skull was three feet long, the upper pair of tusks had disappeared, and those of the lower jaw were bent down with a backward curve in walrus fashion.
In the true ELEPHANTS, which do not appear until near the close of the Tertiary, the lower jaw loses its tusks and the grinding teeth become exceedingly complex in structure. The grinding teeth of the mastodon had long roots and low crowns crossed by four or five peaked enameled ridges. In the teeth of the true elephants the crown has become deep, and the ridges of enamel have changed to numerous upright, platelike folds, their interspaces filled with cement. The two genera–Mastodon and Elephant–are connected by species whose teeth are intermediate in pattern. The proboscidians culminated in the Pliocene, when some of the giant elephants reached a height of fourteen feet.
THE ARTIODACTYLS comprise the hoofed Mammalia which have an even number of toes, such as cattle, sheep, and swine. Like the perissodactyls, they are descended from the primitive five-toed plantigrade mammals of the lowest Eocene. In their evolution, digit number one was first dropped, and the middle pair became larger and more massive, while the side digits, numbers two and five, became shorter, weaker, and less serviceable. The FOUR-TOED ARTIODACTYLS culminated in the Tertiary; at present they are represented only by the hippopotamus and the hog. Along the main line of the evolution of the artiodactyls the side toes, digits two and five, disappeared, leaving as proof that they once existed the corresponding bones of palm and sole as splints. The TWO-TOED ARTIODACTYLS, such as the camels, deer, cattle, and sheep, are now the leading types of the herbivores.
SWINE AND PECCARIES are two branches of a common stock, the first developing in the Old World and the second in the New. In the Miocene a noticeable offshoot of the line was a gigantic piglike brute, a root eater, with a skull a yard in length, whose remains are now found in Colorado and South Dakota.
CAMELS AND LLAMAS. The line of camels and llamas developed in North America, where the successive changes from an early Eocene ancestor, no larger than a rabbit, are traced step by step to the present forms, as clearly as is the evolution of the horse. In the late Miocene some of the ancestral forms migrated to the Old World by way of a land connection where Bering Strait now is, and there gave rise to the camels and dromedaries. Others migrated into South America, which had now been connected with our own continent, and these developed into the llamas and guanacos, while those of the race which remained in North America became extinct during the Pleistocene.
Some peculiar branches of the camel stem appeared in North America. In the Pliocene arose a llama with the long neck and limbs of a giraffe, whose food was cropped from the leaves and branches of trees. Far more generalized in structure was the Oreodon, an animal related to the camels, but with distinct affinities also with other lines, such as those of the hog and deer. These curious creatures were much like the peccary in appearance, except for their long tails. In the middle Eocene they roamed in vast herds from Oregon to Kansas and Nebraska.
THE RUMINANTS. This division of the artiodactyls includes antelopes, deer, oxen, bison, sheep, and goats,–all of which belong to a common stock which took its rise in Europe in the upper Eocene from ancestral forms akin to those of the camels. In the Miocene the evolution of the two-toed artiodactyl foot was well-nigh completed. Bonelike growths appeared on the head, and the two groups of the ruminants became specialized,–the deer with bony antlers, shed and renewed each year, and the ruminants with hollow horns, whose two bony knobs upon the skull are covered with permanent, pointed, horny sheaths.
The ruminants evolved in the Old World, and it was not until the later Miocene that the ancestors of the antelope and of some deer found their way to North America. Mountain sheep and goats, the bison and most of the deer, did not arrive until after the close of the Tertiary, and sheep and oxen were introduced by man.
The hoofed mammals of the Tertiary included many offshoots from the main lines which we have traced. Among them were a number of genera of clumsy, ponderous brutes, some almost elephantine in their bulk.
THE CARNIVORES. The ancestral lines of the families of the flesh eaters–such as the cats (lions, tigers, etc.), the bears, the hyenas, and the dogs (including wolves and foxes)–converge in the creodonts of the early Eocene,–an order so generalized that it had affinities not only with the carnivores but also with the insect eaters, the marsupials, and the hoofed mammals as well. From these primitive flesh eaters, with small and simple brains, numerous small teeth, and plantigrade tread, the different families of the carnivores of the present have slowly evolved.
DOGS AND BEARS. The dog family diverged from the creodonts late in the Eocene, and divided into two branches, one of which evolved the wolves and the other the foxes. An offshoot gave rise to the family of the bears, and so closely do these two families, now wide apart, approach as we trace them back in Tertiary times that the Amphicyon, a genus doglike in its teeth and bearlike in other structures, is referred by some to the dog and by others to the bear family. The well-known plantigrade tread of bears is a primitive characteristic which has survived from their creodont ancestry.
CATS. The family of the cats, the most highly specialized of all the carnivores, divided in the Tertiary into two main branches. One, the saber-tooth tigers (Fig. 351), which takes its name from their long, saberlike, sharp-edged upper canine teeth, evolved a succession of genera and species, among them some of the most destructive beasts of prey which ever scourged the earth. They were masters of the entire northern hemisphere during the middle Tertiary, but in Europe during the Pliocene they declined, from unknown causes, and gave place to the other branch of cats,–which includes the lions, tigers, and leopards. In the Americas the saber-tooth tigers long survived the epoch.
MARINE MAMMALS. The carnivorous mammals of the sea–whales, seals, walruses, etc.–seem to have been derived from some of the creodonts of the early Tertiary by adaptation to aquatic life. Whales evolved from some land ancestry at a very early date in the Tertiary; in the marine deposits of the Eocene are found the bones of the Zeuglodon, a whalelike creature seventy feet in length.
PRIMATES. This order, which includes lemurs, monkeys, apes, and man, seems to have sprung from a creodont or insectivorous ancestry in the lower Eocene. Lemur-like types, with small, smooth brains, were abundant in the United States in the early Tertiary, but no primates have been found here in the middle Tertiary and later strata. In Europe true monkeys were introduced in the Miocene, and were abundant until the close of the Tertiary, when they were driven from the continent by the increasing cold.
ADVANCE OF THE MAMMALIA DURING THE TERTIARY. During the several millions of years comprised in Tertiary time the mammals evolved from the lowly, simple types which tenanted the earth at the beginning of the period, into the many kinds of highly specialized mammals of the Pleistocene and the present, each with the various structures of the body adapted to its own peculiar mode of life. The swift feet of the horse, the horns of cattle and the antlers of the deer, the lion’s claws and teeth, the long incisors of the beaver, the proboscis of the elephant, were all developed in Tertiary times. In especial the brain of the Tertiary mammals constantly grew larger relatively to the size of body, and the higher portion of the brain–the cerebral lobes–increased in size in comparison with the cerebellum. Some of the hoofed mammals now have a brain eight or ten times the size of that of their early Tertiary predecessors of equal bulk. Nor can we doubt that along with the increasing size of brain went a corresponding increase in the keenness of the senses, in activity and vigor, and in intelligence.
CHAPTER XXII
THE QUATERNARY
The last period of geological history, the Quaternary, may be said to have begun when all, or nearly all, living species of mollusks and most of the existing mammals had appeared.
It is divided into two great epochs. The first, the Pleistocene or Glacial epoch, is marked off from the Tertiary by the occupation of the northern parts of North America and Europe by vast ice sheets; the second, the Recent epoch, began with the disappearance of the ice sheets from these continents, and merges into the present time.
THE PLEISTOCENE EPOCH
We now come to an episode of unusual interest, so different was it from most of the preceding epochs and from the present, and so largely has it influenced the conditions of man’s life.
The records of the Glacial epoch are so plain and full that we are compelled to believe what otherwise would seem almost incredible, –that following the mild climate of the Tertiary came a succession of ages when ice fields, like that of Greenland, shrouded the northern parts of North America and Europe and extended far into temperate latitudes.
THE DRIFT. Our studies of glaciers have prepared us to decipher and interpret the history of the Glacial epoch, as it is recorded in the surface deposits known as the drift. Over most of Canada and the northern states this familiar formation is exposed to view in nearly all cuttings which pass below the surface soil. The drift includes two distinct classes of deposits,–the unstratified drift laid down by glacier ice, and the stratified drift spread by glacier waters.
The materials of the drift are in any given place in part unlike the rock on which it rests. They cannot be derived from the underlying rock by weathering, but have been brought from elsewhere. Thus where a region is underlain by sedimentary rocks, as is the drift-covered area from the Hudson River to the Missouri, the drift contains not only fragments of limestone, sandstone, and shale of local derivation, but also pebbles of many igneous and metamorphic rocks, such as granites, gneisses, schists, dike rocks, quartzites, and the quartz of mineral veins, whose nearest source is the Archean area of Canada and the states of our northern border. The drift received its name when it was supposed that the formation had been drifted by floods and icebergs from outside sources,–a theory long since abandoned.
The distribution also of the drift points clearly to its peculiar origin. Within the limits of the glaciated area it covers the country without regard to the relief, mantling with its debris not only lowlands and valleys but also highlands and mountain slopes.
The boundary of the drift is equally independent of the relief of the land, crossing hills and plains impartially, unlike water-laid deposits, whose margins, unless subsequently deformed, are horizontal. The boundary of the drift is strikingly lobate also, bending outward in broad, convex curves, where there are no natural barriers in the topography of the country to set it such a limit. Under these conditions such a lobate margin cannot belong to deposits of rivers, lakes, or ocean, but is precisely that which would mark the edge of a continental glacier which deployed in broad tongues of ice.
THE ROCK SURFACE UNDERLYING THE DRIFT. Over much of its area the drift rests on firm, fresh rock, showing that both the preglacial mantle of residual waste and the partially decomposed and broken rock beneath it have been swept away. The underlying rock, especially if massive, hard, and of a fine grain, has often been ground down to a smooth surface and rubbed to a polish as perfect as that seen on the rock beside an Alpine glacier where the ice has recently melted back. Frequently it has been worn to the smooth, rounded hummocks known as roches moutonnees, and even rocky hills have been thus smoothed to flowing outlines like roches moutonnees on a gigantic scale. The rock pavement beneath the drift is also marked by long, straight, parallel scorings, varying in size from deep grooves to fine striae as delicate as the hair lines cut by an engraver’s needle. Where the rock is soft or closely jointed it is often shattered to a depth of several feet beneath the drift, while stony clay has been thrust in among the fragments into which the rock is broken.
In the presence of these glaciated surfaces we cannot doubt that the area of the drift has been overridden by vast sheets of ice which, in their steady flow, rasped and scored the rock bed beneath by means of the stones with which their basal layers were inset, and in places plucked and shattered it.
TILL. The unstratified portion of the drift consists chiefly of sheets of dense, stony clay called till, which clearly are the ground moraines of ancient continental glaciers. Till is an unsorted mixture of materials of all sizes, from fine clay and sand, gravel, pebbles, and cobblestones, to large bowlders. The stones of the till are of many kinds, some having been plucked from the bed rock of the locality where they are found, and others having been brought from outside and often distant places. Land ice is the only agent known which can spread unstratified material in such extensive sheets.
The FINE MATERIAL of the till comes from two different sources. In part it is derived from old residual clays, which in the making had been leached of the lime and other soluble ingredients of the rock from which they weathered. In part it consists of sound rock ground fine; a drop of acid on fresh, clayey till often proves by brisk effervescence that the till contains much undecayed limestone flour. The ice sheet, therefore, both scraped up the mantle of long-weathered waste which covered the coun try before its coming, and also ground heavily upon the sound rock underneath, and crushed and wore to rock flour the fragments which it carried.
The color of unweathered till depends on that of the materials of which it is composed. Where red sandstones have contributed largely to its making, as over the Triassic sandstones of the eastern states and the Algonkian sandstones about Lake Superior, the drift is reddish. When derived in part from coaly shales, as over many outcrops of the Pennsylvanian, it may when moist be almost black. Fresh till is normally a dull gray or bluish, so largely is it made up of the grindings of unoxidized rocks of these common colors.
Except where composed chiefly of sand or coarser stuff, unweathered till is often exceedingly dense. Can you suggest by what means it has been thus compacted? Did the ice fields of the Glacial epoch bear heavy surface moraines like the medial and lateral moraines of valley glaciers? Where was the greater part of the load of these ice fields carried, judging from what you know of the glaciers of Greenland?
BOWLDERS OF THE DRIFT. The pebbles and bowlders of the drift are in part stream gravels, bowlders of weathering, and other coarse rock waste picked up from the surface of the country by the advancing ice, and in part are fragments plucked from ledges of sound rock after the mantle of waste had been removed. Many of the stones of the till are dressed as only glacier ice can do; their sharp edges have been blunted and their sides faceted and scored.
We may easily find all stages of this process represented among the pebbles of the till. Some are little worn, even on their edges; some are planed and scored on one side only; while some in their long journey have been ground down to many facets and have lost much of their original bulk. Evidently the ice played fast and loose with a stone carried in its basal layers, now holding it fast and rubbing it against the rock beneath, now loosening its grasp and allowing the stone to turn.
Bowlders of the drift are sometimes found on higher ground than their parent ledges. Thus bowlders have been left on the sides of Mount Katahdin, Maine, which were plucked from limestone ledges twelve miles distant and three thousand feet lower than their resting place. In other cases stones have been carried over mountain ranges, as in Vermont, where pebbles of Burlington red sandstone were dragged over the Green Mountains, three thousand feet in height, and left in the Connecticut valley sixty miles away. No other geological agent than glacier ice could do this work.
The bowlders of the drift are often large. Bowlders ten and twenty feet in diameter are not uncommon, and some are known whose diameter exceeds fifty feet. As a rule the average size of bowlders decreases with increasing distance from their sources. Why?
TILL PLAINS. The surface of the drift, where left in its initial state, also displays clear proof of its glacial origin. Over large areas it is spread in level plains of till, perhaps bowlder- dotted, similar to the plains of stony clay left in Spitzbergen by the recent retreat of some of the glaciers of that island. In places the unstratified drift is heaped in hills of various kinds, which we will now describe.
DRUMLINS. Drumlins are smooth, rounded hills composed of till, elliptical in base, and having their longer axes parallel to the movement of the ice as shown by glacial scorings. They crowd certain districts in central New York and in southern Wisconsin, where they may be counted by the thousands. Among the numerous drumlins about Boston is historic Bunker Hill.
Drumlins are made of ground moraine. They were accumulated and given shape beneath the overriding ice, much as are sand bars in a river, or in some instances were carved, like roches moutonnees, by an ice sheet out of the till left by an earlier ice invasion.
TERMINAL MORAINES. The glaciated area is crossed by belts of thickened drift, often a mile or two, and sometimes even ten miles and more, in breadth, which lie transverse to the movement of the ice and clearly are the terminal moraines of ancient ice sheets, marking either the limit of their farthest advance or pauses in their general retreat.
The surface of these moraines is a jumble of elevations and depressions, which vary from low, gentle swells and shallow sags to sharp hills, a hundred feet or so in height, and deep, steep- sided hollows. Such tumultuous hills and hummocks, set with depressions of all shapes, which usually are without outlet and are often occupied by marshes, ponds, and lakes, surely cannot be the work of running water. The hills are heaps of drift, lodged beneath the ice edge or piled along its front. The basins were left among the tangle of morainic knolls and ridges as the margin of the ice moved back and forth. Some bowl-shaped basins were made by the melting of a mass of ice left behind by the retreating glacier and buried in its debris.
THE STRATIFIED DRIFT. Like modern glaciers the ice sheets of the Pleistocene were ever being converted into water about their margins. Their limits on the land were the lines where their onward flow was just balanced by melting and evaporation. On the surface of the ice along the marginal zone, rivulets no doubt flowed in summer, and found their way through crevasses to the interior of the glacier or to the ground. Subglacial streams, like those of the Malaspina glacier, issued from tunnels in the ice, and water ran along the melting ice front as it is seen to do about the glacier tongues of Greenland. All these glacier waters flowed away down the chief drainage channels in swollen rivers loaded with glacial waste.
It is not unexpected therefore that there are found, over all the country where the melting ice retreated, deposits made of the same materials as the till, but sorted and stratified by running water. Some of these were deposited behind the ice front in ice-walled channels, some at the edge of the glaciers by issuing streams, and others were spread to long distances in front of the ice edge by glacial waters as they flowed away.
ESKERS are narrow, winding ridges of stratified sand and gravel whose general course lies parallel with the movement of the glacier. These ridges, though evidently laid by running water, do not follow lines of continuous descent, but may be found to cross river valleys and ascend their sides. Hence the streams by which eskers were laid did not flow unconfined upon the surface of the ground. We may infer that eskers were deposited in the tunnels and ice-walled gorges of glacial streams before they issued from the ice front.
KAMES are sand and gravel knolls, associated for the most part with terminal moraines, and heaped by glacial waters along the margin of the ice.
KAME TERRACES are hummocky embankments of stratified drift sometimes found in rugged regions along the sides of valleys. In these valleys long tongues of glacier ice lay slowly melting. Glacial waters took their way between the edges of the glaciers and the hillside, and here deposited sand and gravel in rude terraces.
Outwash plains are plains of sand and gravel which frequently border terminal moraines on their outward face, and were spread evidently by outwash from the melting ice. Outwash plains are sometimes pitted by bowl-shaped basins where ice blocks were left buried in the sand by the retreating glacier.
Valley trains are deposits of stratified drift with which river valleys have been aggraded. Valleys leading outward from the ice front were flooded by glacial waters and were filled often to great depths with trains of stream-swept drift. Since the disappearance of the ice these glacial flood plains have been dissected by the shrunken rivers of recent times and left on either side the valley in high terraces. Valley trains head in morainic plains, and their material grows finer down valley and coarser toward their sources. Their gradient is commonly greater than that of the present rivers.
THE EXTENT OF THE DRIFT. The extent of the drift of North America and its southern limits are best seen in Figure 359. Its area is reckoned at about four million square miles. The ice fields which once covered so much of our continent were all together ten times as large as the inland ice of Greenland, and about equal to the enormous ice cap which now covers the antartic regions.
The ice field of Europe was much smaller, measuring about seven hundred and seventy thousand square miles.
CENTERS OF DISPERSION. The direction of the movement of the ice is recorded plainly in the scorings of the rock surface, in the shapes of glaciated hills, in the axes of drumlins and eskers, and in trains of bowlders, when the ledges from which they were plucked can be discovered. In these ways it has been proved that in North America there were three centers where ice gathered to the greatest depth, and from which it flowed in all directions outward. There were thus three vast ice fields,–one the Cordilleran, which lay upon the Cordilleras of British America; one the Keewatin, which flowed out from the province of Keewatin, west of Hudson Bay; and one the LABRADOR ice field, whose center of dispersion was on the highlands of the peninsula of Labrador. As shown in Figure 359, the western ice field extended but a short way beyond the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where perhaps it met the far-traveled ice from the great central field. The Keewatin and the Labrador ice fields flowed farthest toward the south, and in the Mississippi valley the one reached the mouth of the Missouri and the other nearly to the mouth of the Ohio. In Minnesota and Wisconsin and northward they merged in one vast field.
The thickness of the ice was so great that it buried the highest mountains of eastern North America, as is proved by the transported bowlders which have been found upon their summits. If the land then stood at its present height above sea level, and if the average slope of the ice were no more than ten feet to the mile,–a slope so gentle that the eye could not detect it and less than half the slope of the interior of the inland ice of Greenland,–the ice plateaus about Hudson Bay must have reached a thickness of at least ten thousand feet.
In Europe the Scandinavian plateau was the chief center of dispersion. At the time of greatest glaciation a continuous field of ice extended from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic, where, off the coasts of Norway and the British Isles, it met the sea in an unbroken ice wall. On the south it reached to southern England, Belgium, and central Germany, and deployed on the eastern plains in wide lobes over Poland and central Russia (Fig. 360).
At the same time the Alps supported giant glaciers many times the size of the surviving glaciers of to-day, and a piedmont glacier covered the plains of northern Switzerland.
THE THICKNESS OF THE DRIFT. The drift is far from uniform in thickness. It is comparatively thin and scanty over the Laurentian highlands and the rugged regions of New England, while from southern New York and Ontario westward over the Mississippi valley, and on the great western plains of Canada, it exceeds an average of one hundred feet over wide areas, and in places has five and six times that thickness. It was to this marginal belt that the ice sheets brought their loads, while northwards, nearer the centers of dispersion, erosion was excessive and deposition slight.
SUCCESSIVE ICE INVASIONS AND THEIR DRIFT SHEETS. Recent studies of the drift prove that it does not consist of one indivisible formation, but includes a number of distinct drift sheets, each with its own peculiar features. The Pleistocene epoch consisted, therefore, of several glacial stages,–during each of which the ice advanced far southward,–together with the intervening interglacial stages when, under a milder climate, the ice melted back toward its sources or wholly disappeared.
The evidences of such interglacial stages, and the means by which the different drift sheets are told apart, are illustrated in Figure 361. Here the country from N to S is wholly covered by drift, but the drift from N to m is so unlike that from m to S that we may believe it the product of a distinct ice invasion and deposited during another and far later glacial stage. The former drift is very young, for its drainage is as yet immature, and there are many lakes and marshes upon its surface; the latter is far older, for its surface has been thoroughly dissected by its streams. The former is but slightly weathered, while the latter is so old that it is deeply reddened by oxidation and is leached of its soluble ingredients such as lime. The younger drift is bordered by a distinct terminal moraine, while the margin of the older drift is not thus marked. Moreover, the two drift sheets are somewhat unlike in composition, and the different proportion of pebbles of the various kinds of rocks which they contain shows that their respective glaciers followed different tracks and gathered their loads from different regions. Again, in places beneath the younger drift there is found the buried land surface of an older drift with old soils, forest grounds, and vegetable deposits, containing the remains of animals and plants, which tell of the climate of the interglacial stage in which they lived.
By such differences as these the following drift sheets have been made out in America, and similar subdivisions have been recognized in Europe.
5 The Wisconsin formation
4 The Iowan formation
3 The Illinoian formation
2 The Kansan formation
1 The pre-Kansan or Jerseyan formation
In New Jersey and Pennsylvania the edge of a deeply weathered and eroded drift sheet, the Jerseyan, extends beyond the limits of a much younger overlying drift. It may be the equivalent of a deep- buried basal drift sheet found in the Mississippi valley beneath the Kansan and parted from it by peat, old soil, and gravel beds.
The two succeeding stages mark the greatest snowfall of the Glacial epoch. In Kansan times the Keewatin ice field slowly grew southward until it reached fifteen hundred miles from its center of dispersion and extended from the Arctic Ocean to northeastern Kansas. In the Illinoian stage the Labrador ice field stretched from Hudson Straits nearly to the Ohio River in Illinois. In the Iowan and the Wisconsin, the closing stages of the Glacial epoch, the readvancing ice fields fell far short of their former limits in the Mississippi valley, but in the eastern states the Labrador ice field during Wisconsin times overrode for the most part all earlier deposits, and, covering New England, probably met the ocean in a continuous wall of ice which set its bergs afloat from Massachusetts to northern Labrador.
We select for detailed description the Kansan and the Wisconsin formations as representatives, the one of the older and the other of the younger drift sheets.
THE KANSAN FORMATION. The Kansan drift consists for the most part of a sheet of clayey till carrying smaller bowlders than the later drift. Few traces of drumlins, kames, or terminal moraines are found upon the Kansan drift, and where thick enough to mask the preexisting surface, it seems to have been spread originally in level plains of till.
The initial Kansan plain has been worn by running water until there are now left only isolated patches and the narrow strips and crests of the divides, which still rise to the ancient level. The valleys of the larger streams have been opened wide. Their well- developed tributaries have carved nearly the entire plain to valley slopes (Figs. 50 B, and 59). The lakes and marshes which once marked the infancy of the region have long since been effaced. The drift is also deeply weathered. The till, originally blue in color, has been yellowed by oxidation to a depth of ten and twenty feet and even more, and its surface is sometimes rusted to terra-cotta red. To a somewhat less depth it has been leached of its lime and other soluble ingredients. In the weathered zone its pebbles, especially where the till is loose in texture, are sometimes so rotted that granites may be crumbled with the fingers. The Kansan drift is therefore old.
THE WISCONSIN FORMATION. The Wisconsin drift sheet is but little weathered and eroded, and therefore is extremely young. Oxidation has effected it but slightly, and lime and other soluble plant foods remain undissolved even at the grass roots. Its river systems are still in their infancy (Fig. 50, A). Swamps and peat bogs are abundant on its undrained surface, and to this drift sheet belong the lake lands of our northern states and of the Laurentian peneplain of Canada.
The lake basins of the Wisconsin drift are of several different classes. Many are shallow sags in the ground moraine. Still more numerous are the lakes set in hollows among the hills of the terminal moraines; such as the thousands of lakelets of eastern Massachusetts. Indeed, the terminal moraines of the Wisconsin drift may often be roughly traced on maps by means of belts of lakes and ponds. Some lakes are due to the blockade of ancient valleys by morainic delms, and this class includes many of the lakes of the Adirondacks, the mountain regions of New England, and the Laurentian area. Still other lakes rest in rock basins scooped out by glaciers. In many cases lakes are due to more than one cause, as where preglacial valleys have both been basined by the ice and blockaded by its moraines. The Finger lakes of New York, for example, occupy such glacial troughs.
Massive TERMINAL MORAINES, which mark the farthest limits to which the Wisconsin ice advanced, have been traced from Cape Cod and the islands south of New England, across the Appalachians and the Mississippi valley, through the Dakotas, and far to the north over the plains of British America. Where the ice halted for a time in its general retreat, it left RECESSIONAL MORAINES, as this variety of the terminal moraine is called. The moraines of the Wisconsin drift lie upon the country like great festoons, each series of concentric loops marking the utmost advance of broad lobes of the ice margin and the various pauses in their recession.
Behind the terminal moraines lie wide till plains, in places studded thickly with drumlins, or ridged with an occasional esker. Great outwash plains of sand and gravel lie in front of the moraine belts, and long valley trains of coarse gravels tell of the swift and powerful rivers of the time.
THE LOESS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. A yellow earth, quite like the loess of China, is laid broadly as a surface deposit over the Mississippi valley from eastern Nebraska to Ohio outside the boundaries of the Iowan and the Wisconsin drift. Much of the loess was deposited in Iowan times. It is younger than the earlier drift sheets, for it overlies their weathered and eroded surfaces. It thickens to the Iowan drift border, but is not found upon that drift. It is older than the Wisconsin, for in many places it passes underneath the Wisconsin terminal moraines. In part the loess seems to have been washed from glacial waste and spread in sluggish glacial waters, and in part to have been distributed by the wind from plains of aggrading glacial streams.
THE EFFECTS OF THE ICE INVASIONS ON RIVERS. The repeated ice invasions of the Pleistocene profoundly disarranged the drainage systems of our northern states. In some regions the ancient valleys were completely filled with drift. On the withdrawal of the ice the streams were compelled to find their way, as best they could, over a fresh land surface, where we now find them flowing on the drift in young, narrow channels. But hundreds of feet below the ground the well driller and the prospector for coal and oil discover deep, wide, buried valleys cut in rock,–the channels of preglacial and interglacial streams. In places the ancient valleys were filled with drift to a depth of a hundred feet, and sometimes even to a depth of four hundred and five hundred feet. In such valleys, rivers now flow high above their ancient beds of rock on floors of valley drift. Many of the valleys of our present rivers are but patchworks of preglacial, interglacial, and postglacial courses (Fig. 366). Here the river winds along an ancient valley with gently sloping sides and a wide alluvial floor perhaps a mile or so in width, and there it enters a young, rock-walled gorge, whose rocky bed may be crossed by ledges over which the river plunges in waterfalls and rapids.
In such cases it is possible that the river was pushed to one side of its former valley by a lobe of ice, and compelled to cut a new channel in the adjacent uplands. A section of the valley may have been blockaded with morainic waste, and the lake formed behind the barrier may have found outlet over the country to one side of the ancient drift-filled valley. In some instances it would seem that during the waning of the ice sheets, glacial streams, while confined within walls of stagnant ice, cut down through the ice and incised their channels on the underlying country, in some cases being let down on old river courses, and in other cases excavating gorges in adjacent uplands.
PLEISTOCENE LAKES. Temporary lakes were formed wherever the ice front dammed the natural drainage of the region. Some, held in the minor valleys crossed by ice lobes, were small, and no doubt many were too short-lived to leave lasting records. Others, long held against the northward sloping country by the retreating ice edge, left in their beaches their clayey beds, and their outlet channels permanent evidences of their area and depth. Some of these glacial lakes are thus known to have been larger than any present lake.
Lake Agassiz, named in honor of the author of the theory of continental glaciation, is supposed to have been held by the united front of the Keewatin and the Labrador ice fields as they finally retreated down the valley of the Red River of the North and the drainage basin of Lake Winnipeg. From first to last Lake Agassiz covered a hundred and ten thousand square miles in Manitoba and the adjacent parts of Minnesota and North Dakota,–an area larger than all the Great Lakes combined. It discharged its waters across the divide which held it on the south, and thus excavated the valley of the Minnesota River. The lake bed–a plain of till–was spread smooth and level as a floor with lacustrine silts. Since Lake Agassiz vanished with the melting back of the ice beyond the outlet by the Nelson River into Hudson Bay, there has gathered on its floor a deep humus, rich in the nitrogenous elements so needful for the growth of plants, and it is to this soil that the region owes its well-known fertility.