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Show 163 creation," he said. And this in turn was followed by a "deep seated reaction," as "fluidal masses inside the earth boiled up once more with great intensity." In other words, the causes of the glacial age and the subsequent rebirth came from within the earth. Earth in turn was intimately connected to its core with the life on its surface. The surface of the earth is not simply a stage on which the thousands of present and past inhabitants played their parts in turn. There are much more intimate relations between the earth and the living organisms which populated it, and it may even be demonstrated that the earth was developed because of them. This was the sort of teleology which enraptured Muir, since it suggested so much about a living geological earth which harmonized with the meadows, groves, beasts and birds. So, when Muir accepted Agassiz's idea that the glacier was "God's great plow," he also accepted a set of implications which were cosmic in extent. On the one hand, he was blinded from seeing very obvious evidence which contradicts the idea of one great glacial winter in the history of the earth. From Mono Lake on the east side of the Sierra, one can look up at Muir's favorite Bloody Canyon and see parallel and crosscut-ting lateral moraines which bear witness to a periodic glaciation he ignored. For him a glacial era would "separate the knowable from the unknowable in geological history." On the other hand, the belief in one great glacial winter meant that the active glaciers Muir found were living remnants of a single step in the genesis of the Sierra. Genesis was not so very long ago. |