82 Kansas Academy of Science. 



indeed, was it that the cold wave overtook many of the living 

 tropical and temperate species of the earth, and their remains 

 are to-day found frozen in the northern ice, where they are 

 often found heaped up in such quantities, at places in which 

 they huddled together for protection from the icy invader, that 

 Admiral Wrangle tells us that in certain parts of Siberia he 

 and his men climbed over ridges and mounds composed en- 

 tirely of their bones. (Agassiz, Geological Sketches, p. 209.) 



That the coming of the cold wave was sudden, and that the 

 animals were slaughtered outright by it, is attested by more 

 than one scientific author. On this subject Louis Figuier says : 

 "The northern and central parts of Europe, the vast countries 

 which extend from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and 

 Danube, were visited by a period of sudden and severe cold; 

 the temperature of the polar regions seized them. The plains 

 of Europe, but now [Miocene Tertiary] ornamented by the 

 luxurious vegetation developed by the heat of a burning cli- 

 mate; the boundless pastures, on which herds of great ele- 

 phants, the active horse, the robust hippopotamus and the 

 great carnivorous animals grazed and roamed, became almost 

 instantly covered with a mantle of ice and snow." (The 

 World Before the Deluge, p. 435.) 



Figuier continues: "We can not doubt, after such testi- 

 mony, of the existence in the frozen North of the almost entire 

 remains of the mammoth. The animals seem to have perished, 

 suddenly enveloped in ice at the moment of their death ; their 

 bodies have been preserved from decomposition by the con- 

 tinual action of cold." (The World Before the Deluge, p. 496.) 



And again Cuvier says : "If they [the animals] had not been 

 frozen as soon as killed, putrefaction would have decomposed 

 them ; and, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not have 

 previously prevailed in the place where they died, for they 

 could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, 

 at the same instant when these animals perished that the coun- 

 try they inhabited was rendered glacial. These events must 

 have been sudden, instantaneous, and without any gradation." 

 (Ossements, Fossils; Discourse sur les Revolutions de Globe.) 



The above-mentioned snow continued to fall for ages, till 

 an ice sheet of immense thickness was formed, not at one pole, 

 but at both. This is the glacial epoch. 



