There is no escaping these conclusions. Agassiz himself says,
describing the Glacial age:
"All the springs were dried up; the rivers ceased to flow. To the
movements of a numerous and animated creation _succeeded the silence
of death_."
If the verdure was covered with ice a mile in thickness, all animals
that lived on vegetation of any kind must have perished;
consequently, all carnivores which lived on these must have ceased to
exist; and man himself, without animal or vegetable food, must have
disappeared for ever.
A writer, describing Greenland wrapped in such an ice-sheet, says
[1. "Travels in Africa," p. 188.
2. "Sketches of Creation," pp. 222, 223.]
{p. 41}
"The whole interior seems to be buried beneath a great depth of snow
and ice, which loads up the valleys and wraps over the hills. The
scene opening to view in the interior is desolate in the
extreme--nothing but one dead, dreary expanse of white, so far as the
eye can reach--_no living creature frequents this wilderness--neither
bird, beast, nor insect_. The silence, deep as death, is broken only
when the roaring storm arises to sweep before it the pitiless,
blinding snow.
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