1898] NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 265 



is any evidence of sviccession, and I claim to have shown that in no 

 instance, so far as we know, does the Drift actually underlie any land 

 surface containing the remains of the Mammoth and of its con- 

 temporaries {Geol. Mag. for 1892-1893 'passim). 



No doubt Mammoth's teeth and bones, and the remains of its 

 companions, have been found in boulder clay and in pockets inter- 

 calated in that clay ; so have ammonites and belemnites and bones of 

 Liassic saurians of coal plants, of Triassic shells of Carboniferous 

 corals, etc., etc. But in all these cases the remains in question are 

 adventitious, and have been collected by the force, whatever it was, 

 that distributed the clay, and they occur in the Drift beds as boulders, 

 just as certain broken trunks of trees do. To call the remains of 

 the Mammoth when so found iuterglacial, and to refuse the same 

 style to the ammonites and belemnites, is inconsequent. Nay, 

 more, it would be almost incredible if some of those massive teeth 

 and bones had not occurred as boulders in the drift, since they must 

 have been lying about on the old land surface over which the drift 

 was deposited. 



The fact is that there would not have been any question raised 

 about the matter in these later days with the present knowledge we 

 possess if it had not been that a certain number (a rapidly diminish- 

 ing number, if I am to judge by the conversations and correspon- 

 dence I have had lately) of geologists are committed to the purely a 

 priori theory of iuterglacial periods, which theory again was the 

 product of the now entirely discredited astronomical theory of an 

 ice age. It is the desperate straits to which the champions of inter- 

 glacial periods are driven that makes them cling to these boulder- 

 bones and teeth as evidences of so-called interglacial beds. And 

 this clinging is emphasised by the fact that more inconsequent, un- 

 scientific, and childish nonsense seems to me to have been written on 

 so-called interglacial beds in the memoirs of the Geological Survey 

 dealing with the surface deposits than upon any other subject. The 

 term is used over and over again in these memoirs without any 

 attempt to justify it, as if there was any general concurrence of 

 opinion to support it, whereas if the geologists of the world were 

 polled, the number of believers in what is a mere hypothesis, even- 

 tually based upon Croll's now exploded astronomical theory of an 

 ice age, would be found to be a mere handful. Surely we have a 

 right to complain that in Government publications, paid for by the 

 taxpayer, and carrying the authority of official documents, an hypo- 

 thesis so generally discredited and so generally discarded should be 

 so calmly assumed as if it had the authority of an axiom. 



No one objects to the theory of interglacial periods, or of the 

 possibility of squaring the circle, or of extracting sunbeams from 

 cucumbers being defended in private and individual memoirs like 



T 



