This change from icy darkness and death to life and beauty was slow, as
we count time, and is still going on, north and south, over all the
world wherever glaciers exist, whether in the form of distinct rivers,
as in Switzerland, Norway, the mountains of Asia, and the Pacific Coast;
or in continuous mantling folds, as in portions of Alaska, Greenland,
Franz-Joseph-Land, Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen, and the lands about the
South Pole. But in no country, as far as I know, may these majestic
changes be studied to better advantage than in the plains and mountains
of California.
Toward the close of the glacial period, when the snow-clouds became less
fertile and the melting waste of sunshine became greater, the lower
folds of the ice-sheet in California, discharging fleets of icebergs
into the sea, began to shallow and recede from the lowlands, and then
move slowly up the flanks of the Sierra in compliance with the changes
of climate. The great white mantle on the mountains broke up into a
series of glaciers more or less distinct and river-like, with many
tributaries, and these again were melted and divided into still smaller
glaciers, until now only a few of the smallest residual topmost branches
of the grand system exist on the cool slopes of the summit peaks.
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