266 NATURAL SCIENCE [April 



" Gulliver's Travels." "What we object to is these fallacies beiug 

 published as the State geological religion. 



It is really too amusing how far the matter is carried. At a 

 recent meeting of the Geological Society a paper was read upon the 

 never-ending problem of the relation of the Drift to the Mammoth 

 beds in the caves of North Wales. It was shown by the author of 

 that paper, Mr Pollen, very conclusively that the Drift overlies the 

 beds contemporary with the Mammoth in the particular case in 

 question. Therefore my friend, Mr C. Eeid, who has done an immense 

 amount of careful and very valuable observation, to which I personally 

 am under great obligations, but who is an arch-sinner in regard to 

 the championship of transcendental theories, at once suggested that 

 the beds in question were interglacial. " Interglacial" to most people 

 means " placed between two glacial beds," but this is not its mean- 

 ing apparently when used by Mr Eeid. To him a bed becomes 

 interglacial if it is merely covered by Drift. It was a curious 

 epilogue to the discussion in question that Mr Strahan, who has 

 surveyed and mapped the surface beds of North Wales with 

 singular care and skill, should have got up and declared very posi- 

 tively that there is not the slightest trace of interglacial beds in 

 North Wales at all. 



I must be allowed to quote another amusing example. So- 

 called palaeolithic man, as is well known, was the contemporary of 

 the Mammoth. But for some reason a certain number of writers 

 committed themselves long ago to the idea that palaeolithic man 

 did not live before the distribution of the Drift, but after it. The 

 evidence drawn from the Mammoth beds, etc., however, was getting 

 very awkward, and pointed very definitely the other way. The 

 British Association was accordingly invited to make a grant to test 

 by an excavation the famous typical site at Hoxne, where the 

 evidence had been read in different ways by different explorers. 

 Some of us gladly welcomed the appointment of a committee, but 

 were taken very much aback when we found that the only men put 

 upon it were those already committed (may I say violently com- 

 mitted) to the view that the implement-bearing deposit at Hoxne 

 was newer than the Drift. This was not very promising, nor was it 

 quite judicial. It was, in fact, indecent. When the report came 

 out our suspicions were more than justified, for a more extraordinary 

 discussion and summing up of a serious polemical subject was 

 perhaps never seen. 



This is not the occasion to discuss the Keport in detail. That 

 may be done on another occasion. At present I would merely refer 

 to one point (perhaps the strongest argument used) as a sample of 

 the kind of arguments used. It is well known that in East Anglia 

 the crag beds occur in more than one form, and in most places in 



