The great revolution begins with the gathering of snows on the
mountains. The Alps and Pyrenees had now, we saw, reached their
full stature, and the gathering snows on their summits began to
glide down toward the plains in rivers of ice. The Apennines (and
even the mountains of Corsica), the Balkans, Carpathians,
Caucasus, and Ural Mountains, shone in similar mantles of ice and
snow. The mountains of Wales, the north of England, Scotland, and
Scandinavia had even heavier burdens, and, as the period
advanced, their sluggish streams of ice poured slowly over the
plains. The trees struggled against the increasing cold in the
narrowing tracts of green; the animals died, migrated to the
south, or put on arctic coats. At length the ice-sheets of
Scandinavia met the spreading sheets from Scotland and Wales, and
crept over Russia and Germany, and an almost continuous mantle,
from which only a few large areas of arctic vegetation peeped
out, was thrown over the greater part of Europe. Ten thousand
feet thick where it left the hills of Norway and Sweden, several
thousand feet thick even in Scotland, the ice-sheet that resulted
from the fusion of the glaciers gradually thinned as it went
south, and ended in an irregular fringe across Central Europe.
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