62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Quaternary geology. For thirty years and more geologists have 

 known, and have been staring helplessly on the fact, that in North 

 Wales one of the hills of the Snowdon range is covered with a 

 marine gravel at a level of 1,130 feet above that of the present 

 sea. They have known the fact that this gravel contains shells 

 in abundance, all of existing species. They have known it, but 

 most of them have been reluctant to " occupy themselves about it 

 in any way." Even in recording it they generally leave it, if not 

 " with a smile and a shrug," at least with a timid and embarrassed 

 glance. Yet nothing in the whole range of their science is more 

 mysterious and instructive than that Moel Trefan top. Old 

 Ocean has been there, and he has been there very lately. He has 

 been there as regards the area and the locality, and he has been 

 there in a passing way, but he has not necessarily been there as 

 regards its existing level. Prof. Huxley tells us that a heaping 

 of the sea over a particular place is a physical impossibility. I 

 quite agree. Then it follows that Moel Trefan must have been 

 sunk under the sea and raised out of it again, all within our exist- 

 ing age. Can the learned professor tell us how wide has been the 

 area of depression in which Moel Trefan was included ? Was it 

 contemporaneous or not with a like submergence all over the 

 Highlands of Scotland ? And if so, where did it stop ? Prof. 

 Prestwich has said that it prevailed over the whole of Ireland, 

 over the whole of Wales, over all the center and north of Eng- 

 land, and over the whole of Scotland.* A large part of Russia, 

 and all northern Germany down to Holland, were also included, f 

 And is he certain that it was not wider still, and included larger 

 areas of the whole northern hemisphere ? Quaternary geology 

 certainly suggests, even if it does not establish, that it did. Italian 

 geologists of the highest authority report the same facts from 

 Calabria and from Sicily. Gravels with three hundred kinds of 

 existing shells are piled up at elevations 2,400 feet above the Medi- 

 terranean. Was Charles Darwin an ignoramus in geology when 

 he recognized exactly the same phenomena on the vast continent 

 of South America ? The facts he records respecting the massive 

 marine gravels of Patagonia, the recency of them, and the cor- 

 relative destruction of the great mammalia, are more astonishing 

 even than the parallel facts in Europe. % Are the geologists of 

 Canada deceived when they report similar facts as establishing 

 similar conclusions over the greater part of northern America ? 

 If the submergence was local, but the locality was as large at least 

 as the British Islands, how " particularly absurd " is the assumed 

 impossibility of a partial deluge ! If it was far wider, then how 



* Proceedings of the Royal Society, No. 196, 18*79. 



t Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, August, 1887. 



% Naturalist's Voyage, edition of 1S52, pp. 170-176. 



