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.