Aprils, 1876.] -^47 [Price. 



peninsula of Kola, and Northeastern Finland demonstrates that the great 

 Mer de glace radiated outwards from the high grounds of Norway and 

 Sweden, flowing north and northeast into the Arctic Ocean and east into the 

 White Sea, and thus clearly proving that Northern Europe was not over- 

 flowed by a vast ice-cap creeping outward from the North Pole, as some 

 geologists have supposed." 382. These are Geikie's words ; and here he is 

 at issue with James Croll and Agassiz. 



Geiitie proceeds : " After that boulder-clay had been laid down, dry land 

 appeared in Scotland and the north of England ; and at a later date, a 

 movement of subsidence ensued which resulted in drowning Wales to a 

 depth probably of not less than two thousand feet." "All we know is tliat 

 Scotl.'nd, Wales, and the north of England were largely submerged." 

 Geikie, 479. The south and southeast of England was not submerged, and 

 that portion only contained paleolithic instruments ; but the neolithic occur 

 everywhere in and througliout tlie British Islands ; 480 ; and here were no 

 traces of glaciation ; 479 ; the line of division being the middle of England; 

 484. The islands and continent became connected; 485. 



He says : "It is remarkable, that nowhere in the great plains of Siberia 

 do anj' traces of glacial action appear to have been observed." lb. 495. 

 "Consequently we find the great river deposits with their mammalian re- 

 mains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in those high lati- 

 tudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface." 496. 



In the regions of Alaska, west of the Rocky Mountains we have, says 

 James Geikie, "a continuation of the same physical conditions that charac- 

 terize the more northern latitudes of Asia, namely, great plains intersected 

 bj^ large rivers. Along the banks of these rivers, north of Mount St. Elias, 

 numerous mammalian remains, especially the mammoth, have been de- 

 tected." " But in the northern latitudes, east of the Rocky Mountains, no 

 such mammalian remains have been detected." " They are rare also or 

 altogether wanting in Canada." "Nevertheless, proofs are not wanting of 

 a former mild condition of things having prevailed within comparatively 

 recent times in the far north of British America." 497. 



The glacialists generally find no cause for the great ice sheet, whose 

 effects they see, in the elevation of the mountains, or in ice floods, nor in 

 ice rafts floating from the pole. Mr. James Croll finds its cause in the 

 earth's movement in an elliptical and eccentric orbit round the sun, which 

 is central to one end of the ellipse, so that when the earth moves in the 

 other end of the ellipse it is three millions of miles farther from the sun, 

 and in the extreme of the orbital eccentricity he says fourteen millions of 

 miles furtiier from the Sun ; and by reason thereof the warmth of the Sun 

 is lessened at its surface. At this time the Earth is nearest the Sun at our 

 mid-winter, and our winter solstice is supposed to be warmer for it ; but 

 by the precession of the equinox, the Sun crosses the equator twenty min- 

 utes and twenty seconds sooner than the year before ; Geikie 129 ; by which 

 process our seasons become gradually shifted in relation to the position of 

 the Earth in its orbit, so that in ten thousand five hundred years our winter 



