All these species have a fixed time for coming and going; their existence is even limited to a determined period. And still they present, as a whole, numerous, and more or less close affinities, a determined coordination in a system of organization which has an intimate relation with the mode of existence of each type, and even of each species. More still: there is an invisible thread which is unwinding itself, through all the ages, in this immense diversity, and offers as a final result a continuous progress in this development of which man is the termination, of which the four classes of vertebrates are the intermediate steps, and the invertebrates the constant accessory. Are not these facts manifestations of a thought as rich as it is powerful, acts of an intelligence as sublime as provident? …T his is, at least, what my feeble intellect reads in the works of creation ….S uch facts loudly proclaim principles which science has not yet discussed, but which paleontological researches place before the eyes of the observer with increasing persistency; I mean the relation of the Creation to the Creator.
Nothing that occurred dming the rest of Agassiz’s life caused him to revise what he had said. He died in i873. Harvard appointed three professors to replace him. Nine years later, in co-working space eindhoven a scientific journal Agassiz had founded, his successor in the chair of geology published a paper describing the Ice Age as a myth. “The so-called glacial epoch . . . so popular a few years ago among glacial geologists may now be rejected without hesitation,” the article concluded. “The glacial epoch was a local phenomenon.”
West of Cleveland, the terrain became increasingly flat. High outcrops disappeared, but now and again a blocky strip of rock would run along the road like a retaining wall-a glimpse of what underlay the surrounding fields. Berea sandstone. Bedford shale. Columbus limestone. “You could map this state at sixty miles an hour,” Anita said. For some distance, the soil over the rock was fine glacial co-working space rotterdam tillground rock flour and sand-and then among white farms we moved out upon a black-earth plain where drainage ditches did the work of streams: a world of absolute level, until recently the bottom of a great lake.