14 
But to-night I am going on the old lines ; the fact of an age of 
ice is, I say, verifiable. Our islands were then a desolation. With 
the exception of a few Arctic plants, and fewer Arctic animals, life, 
which had just previously been so abundant and so luxuriant here, 
bad well nigh disappeared. From Snowdon in Wales, from the 
summits of the Highlands in Scotland, and from the Lake 
Mountains, glaciers rivalling those of the Swiss Alps radiated 
through the valleys in all directions. A great icefield moved away 
from the Scottish Highlands to the 8.H., ‘‘ across the broad plains 
of Perthshire, filling them up to the depth of at least 2,000 feet, 
and pasSing across the range of the Ochil Hills, which, at a 
distance of 12 miles, runs parallel with the Highlands, and reaches 
a height of 2,352 feet. Many mountains in the Highlands are 
glaciated up to the height of 3,000 feet and more, while lakes at 
their feet, 600 feet deep, have been,well ice-worn.” The various 
forms of northern life retreated southwards from the cold, so that 
we find remains of reindeer in Switzerland and the south of France; 
the musk sheep and the Arctic fox beyond the Pyrenees. Now 
and then (I mean at intervals of some thousands of years) a milder 
climate prevailed, and these animals returned, and among them 
we also find that the hairy mammoth, rhinoceros, glutton, and 
lemming peopled the lower grounds, until Arctic conditions once 
more prevailed, At times the land sank until it was invaded by 
vast icefields 1,500 or 2,000 feet thick, which had travelled from 
Norway across the shallow North Sea, passed over Great Britain 
loaded with debris from their native country, and uniting with the 
smaller British ice-streams, pushed onward, and at last formed 
cliffs out in the North Atlantic, some 200 or 300 miles west of 
Ireland and the Hebrides, whence they sent westward and south- 
ward enormous icebergs, as Greenland does now. 
So improbable, nay impossible, some one will say. How could 
these things be? What proofs have we? When did it all take 
place? Above all, What brought it about? let us see what 
answers can be given to these questions. 
The discovery of the great fact of the former existence of an ice 
‘age prevailing over all the northern farts of the world, lasting prob- 
ably some 200,000 years, and terminating about 80,000 years 
ago, is undoubtedly one of the grandest additions to our knowledge 
out of the many which the nineteenth century has seen. We have 
traced back Chaldean civilisation for 6,000 years; Egyptian 
civilisation almost as tar. We can write the history of the Hittites, 
whose great empire had actually passed out of the memory of man 
more completely than the discovery of America by the Norsemen 
had been forgotten by Europe; but what is all this and much more 
to the discovery of the great Ice Age? And it is wholly due to the 
