Mr R. Adie on Ground-Ice, 243 



think that European geology is not called upon to occupy her- 

 self with the creation of man, and that, in our ignorance of 

 the manner of what took place in Asia, there is no argument 

 to be adduced against the idea which I have now brought 

 forward. 



It may be objected, in the second place, that the European 

 fauna would have been too abundant, if we add to the exist- 

 ing species those which the different diluvian inundations 

 have destroyed. I have already said, that these latter were 

 by no means numerous ; and if we compare the existing 

 fauna of Europe with that of Asia and America, we will find 

 it infinitely poorer in mammifera. What may have been 

 created at the commencement of the diluvian epoch would 

 still leave it inferior to them in this point of view. 



These objections do not appear to me to shake the opinion 

 which I here advance, and I think that we may consider it 

 as very probable that the different diluvian formations en- 

 close a series of faunas differing little from each other, a cir- 

 cumstance which proves that the diluvian and modern epochs 

 have been in no way separated by an event comparable to 

 those revolutions of the globe which, at different times, have 

 extinguished existing species, in order to replace them by 

 others wholly different. — {Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve^ 

 N, 7, August 1846.) 



On Ground-Ice. By Mr Richard Adie, Liverpool. Com- 

 municated by the Author.* 



In the present communication, it is my wish to attempt to account 

 for ground-ice, without the intervention of any hypothesis which at- 

 tributes the ice found in the beds of streams to a process of forma- 

 tion in situ. 



An attempt of a similar kind has already been made. Mr Knight, 

 in his description of ground ice, says that spicules were floating in 

 millions in the stream, and that on the faces of stones opposed to the 

 current, where it was only of moderate strength, these spiculae ac- 

 cumulated. The Rev. Mr Esdaile, in a most valuable paper printed 

 in the 17th volume of this Journal, p. 167, quotes Mr Knight's de- 

 scription as almost amounting to demonstration of a theory he pro- 



* Read before the Wernerian Natural History Society. 



