MAN AND THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 61 



Being by nature benevolent, and inheriting a missionary spirit, it did 

 me good to think that I was serving so useful a purpose, and starting 

 a mission for the conversion of these heathen in aesthetics. With a 

 force that almost took away my breath, it came to me that we owe a 

 great debt to the deformeu, the hideous, and the wicked ; that those, 

 the morally hideous, wdioni society hunts down as its worst enemies, 

 spend their lives in serving the very class that seeks to destroy them. 

 Then, too, the goodness and holiness of the reconstructed world ! 

 There were met with only those with whom, having been so well gen- 

 erated for a thousand years, regeneration was impossible. A long 

 line of physical, mental, and moral saints were the ancestors of the 

 race. " What a perfect heaven S " I said to them. But I found upon 

 their faces only a gingerbread-rabbit expression. Such words as 

 heaven and hell conveyed to them no more idea than green or red 

 conveys to a blind man. I was in despair at such a lack of appre- 

 ciation. Here was practically the heaven upon earth which the race 

 had worked for, prayed for, agonized for ; and, now that it had come, 

 no one seemed to enjoy it, or even to know of its existence. It is 

 truly a misfortune to be born in and always to live in heaven. The 

 eternal Law of Differences holds us fast. Hell is a necessity, which 

 must be as deep as heaven is high. The world was better as it was 

 before the reconstructed got hold of it. Give us back the iron age ! 

 All is not gold that glitters. My prayer was answered, and I found 

 myself once more in this world of sin and holiness, joy and sorrow 

 in a word, back in this world of differences. 



-- 



MAN AND THE GLACIAL PEEIOD. 



By THOMAS BELT, F. G. S. 



CONCERNING the Glacial period, geologists hold the most varied 

 opinions, both with regard to its origin and to the mode of ac- 

 tion of the ice. Thus at the very threshold of the geological record we 

 tread on uncertain ground, and every guide points to a different path. 

 The relation that palaeolithic man bore to the great ice age might 

 seem to be of easier solution ; but even this question is unsettled, and 

 a subject of controversy and doubt. Prof. Prestwich is believed by 

 many to have proved that palaeolithic man was post-glacial. Messrs. 

 Croll and Geikie unre that there were two or more glacial periods in 

 post-tertiary times, and that he nourished in a mild interglacial pe- 

 riod. I, on the contrary, have been gradually forced to conclude 

 that, in the British Isles, all the remains in caves and valley-gravels 

 referred to palaeolithic man are preglacial, in the sense that they are 



