40 Mr. Henry Walker's Lectttre : 



THE NORTHERN GROUP OF THE ILFORD ANIMALS. — GLACIAL 



ESSEX. 



Some of the Ilford animals evidently form a Northern 

 and x\rctic group. The warmly-clad mammoth, or woolly 

 elephant, the fleecy rhinoceros, and the brown bear may 

 be taken as examples." If their presence as the native 

 inhabitants of the land denotes, as it midoubtedly does, 

 the reign of a semi- Arctic climate in Essex, where shall we 

 find in the landscapes around us the traces and memorials 

 of an age of snow and ice — of a long-enduring age of 

 glaciers and an all-enveloping ice-sheet, of icebergs and 

 icefloes ! The answer, as we shall see, is not far to seek. 



The Essex hills and plateaux have lately yielded some 

 strange secrets to the explorer. Time was, and not long 

 ago, when the well-known steep of Muswell Hill in 

 Middlesex, one of the leafy " northern heights of London," 

 stood in solitary and mysterious glamour, the only known 

 monument of the great Glacial Period near our metropolis. 

 But to-day the records of the rocks around us are more 

 plainly read. We need not now leave these homely Essex 

 landscapes to find memorials of the Age of Ice in Britain. 

 They are so near to us as to have been long oveilooked 

 for those remoter spots of Glacial Britain where " distance 

 lends enchantment to the view." Let us ascend any of the 

 hills north and south of Epping which reach a height of three 

 hundred feet. We lift a patch of the green turf, and what 

 do we see beneath? The sight is no longer incredible. 

 We look upon the moraine of a long-vanished British 

 glacier, lying where it was left ages ago — a moraine as real 

 as any that underlie the glaciers of Switzerland and 

 Norway to-day, or the wider-spreading ice-sheet of Green- 

 land. The glacier itself has gone, but here lie its remains, 

 too solid and substantial to disappear with the chmate 

 which gave the glacier birth. The strangely commingled 

 wreck and debris of rocks, and fossils, and masses of earth 

 brought here from distant areas, are all before us ; they 

 stretch for many a mile beneath the grass. 



* The musk-ox and the reindeer should also be taken into account, 

 inasmuch as they are found in the Thames Valley, though not at Ilford. 



