[Sidenote: The great Ice Age]
Unless a fellow can swim he has no business to go out of his depth;
but if he minds his business, he loses all the fun.
It is the application of these two principles which leads me to a
problem in the history of the horse which nobody has solved.
The species is native to the Americas, where it became extinct. One
theory of this extinction imagines a germ, like that of
horse-sickness, whose range covered all latitudes from tropic to
sub-arctic. Such a hearty microbe as that would seem unusual.
The other theory relates to a disagreeable change in the climate,
which overwhelmed the drainage basin of the North Atlantic with a
field of massive ice. That seems conclusive until one reflects that
the Pacific slope of the United States and the continent of South
America remained as warm as ever. The cold {16} of the Great Ice Age
does not explain the wiping out even in North America of the camel,
elephant, tapir and horse.
[Sidenote: The Ice Age]
It has been my good fortune to make a series of voyages to Bering Sea
and Norway in the winter, and in summer along the flanks of both the
St. Elias and the Greenland ice-caps. In these journeys by sail and
steam, in boats, in canoes, with many landings and scrambles across
county, I was able to test the theories of Glacialogists against the
actual facts of the Great Ice Age.
The Croll theory makes the orbit of the Earth to change at regular
intervals into a long ellipse. By roasting one entire hemisphere it
provides vapour to cover the whole of the other hemisphere with snows
which do not melt. Evidence is scratched up and made the most of for
previous ice ages. An imaginary series of cosmic cataclysms is
invoked to explain one merely local unpleasantness.
Another theory sinks Central America--politically quite a good
idea--and throws the Gulf Stream into the Pacific, leaving the North
Atlantic to be frozen. It does not explain the American lobe of the
icefield which brushed the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a
region outside the influence of the Gulf Stream.
{17}
It was never the business of Glacialogists to notice that under the
inland ice and the great lava floods of Greenland lie pressed
magnolia leaves in the high Arctic. These tell me of cloudy skies
saving the summer's warmth all through the polar night, of a vast
cloud sphere sheltering the whole Earth from a sun much hotter than
we know to-day. The Ice Age to me is an incident in that clearing of
the skies which dried the world-forest, made the grass steppes and
deserts, and evolved the horse.
[Sidenote: The Ice-field to-day]
The Glacialogists make the Ice Age an episode of the past. Without
the slightest relevance to any obliquity of the Orbit, or vagaries of
the Gulf Stream, the Ice-cap persists to-day as a living fact. I
have been there, have seen it, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
The forces which created the Ice-cap are still at work, and as they
merely strengthen or relax, the Icefield grows or shrinks. These
forces made the Ice flood to plough the fields and train the folk for
seeding a crop of human empires--British, American, Russian, and
German world-powers. The ice which prepared town-sites for Moscow,
Petrograd, Berlin, London, and New York, may come again to sweep them
all away. We are not behaving ourselves so very nicely.
{18}
I have no theory as to what forces enlarged or contracted the ice
flood. The theme of this study is the horse, a creature of grass and
water constructed by the forces in sunshine and fresh air, and
coloured by the skies. To the skies we must look if we would trace
his origin, to the mechanism of the Ice-cap if we would know how his
varieties were specialized out of the general type. So let us have a
look at the machinery which made and maintains the Ice-cap.