GLACIAL MAN. — SKERTCHLY. 139 



clays, and Avere entirely missing from the area that had been 

 ice-worn in the later cold spells, though the caves (as in York- 

 shire), protected from the ice, yielded these tools not rarely. 

 This was my nest-egg, upon which I brooded, and from which 

 I hatched my own poor, pestered pullet. If, I argued, the 

 crude man of the crude weapon followed up retreating ice and 

 retreating reindeer he was the original cold-foot, but a plucky 

 fighting-man. He must have gloried in the brave north mnd 

 which hardened his thews and kept him fit — he was of a race 

 apart. The man who kept behind him on the warm plains and 

 plateaus where 



They say the Lion and the Lizard keep 



The Courts where Janashyd gloried and drank deep 



must have been of other blood. Man in deed and in truth had 

 even thus early segregated into diverse types. And so I set 

 me to track him down. 



For the glacial theory I then drove in my wedge showing 

 that the Boulder Clay which marked the crest of the ice-wave, 

 when ghttering ice-pinnacles o'ertopped the vales of Thames 

 and Severn, had not only gathered where it had not strawed, 

 but oft-times and in divers places had strawed not far from 

 where it had gathered — that the material filched from the 

 blue-black Kimeridge Clay was carried unsullied forward onto 

 the lighter blue Oxford Clay, and so on. No iceberg ever 

 calved at the back of the North Wind loiew enough geology 

 to return its collection of rocks to their parent bed. The Chalky 

 Boulder Clay got challder and chalkier as it spread over 

 cretaceous East AngHa, till some of it held foreign matter in 

 the scant percentage of the beastly powder of my childhood, 

 liydrargerum cum creta. 



It became clear that in pre-glacial times the chalk plateau 

 around Brandon was, as might be expected, furrowed by 

 brook and river, and then buried beneath the burden of the 

 great ice rock-grinder. Then rain and frost and snow set to 

 work to clean the plateau up again, and now only patches of 

 glacial clay remain to witness of the days gone by. Some of 

 these patches lay in hollows in the Chalk, and to my supreme 

 delight beneath this Chalky Boulder Clay I found the shattered 

 fragments of beds of sand and gravel and clay, clearly of 

 fluviatile origin, obviously older than the glacial clay. They 

 were the long-desired evidence of interglacial strata older 

 than the climax of the Great Ice Age, and I named them the 

 Brandon Beds. 



