452 Climate of the Glacial Period. (October, 
which are excavated in the solid rock for hundreds of feet 
below it. These all prove that either the land stood higher 
or the sea lower, and I cannot but agree with Mr. Alfred 
Tylor, who has ably discussed this question, that the cause 
is not a local one, but a general lowering of the level of the 
ocean all over the world in Glacial times. 
To these many evidences of a rise of the level of the sea 
produced by the melting of the ice of the Glacial period, I 
think I may fairly add the traditions of mankind of one or 
more great deluges that overwhelmed peopled lands. In 
America, Africa, and Asia the remembrance of great cata- 
strophes that nearly exterminated mankind in certain regions 
has been handed down, indistinétly it is true, but with a 
marvellous resemblance in the traditions preserved in 
countries of the world far removed from each other. Here, 
again, I think that such a general explanation as that of the 
rise of the waters of the ocean submerging low-lying peopled 
countries—accompanied by earthquake convulsions, such as 
were likely to be occasioned by the strains on the earth’s 
crust when the ice melted off the mountain tops and the 
polar regions, and ran down to the ocean beds—is a more 
likely theory than that the traditions refer to local cata- 
strophes. 
We have proofs that man existed even in England before 
the presumed date of the return of the waters of the ocean, 
When the great lake that I have mentioned filled the southern 
part of the bed of the German Ocean, whilst the northern 
part was still occupied by the retreating ice, man appears on 
the margin of that lake when it stood about two hundred 
feet above the present sea-level. He follows its receding 
shores as the great river running from it cuts through the 
barriers in the English Channel, and throughout its gravelly 
beaches his flint implements are found along with the bones 
of the great mammalia. ‘The lake is gradually lowered until 
the rivers running into it stand only about twenty feet above 
their present level, and the hippopotamus and other southern 
mammalia now come up the great river occasionally ; then 
paleolithic man, and the great mammalia on which he 
possibly subsisted, disappear together, and the waters of the 
sea occupies the bed of the German Ocean and the channel 
of the great river. Not from such rude tribes was, however, 
the story of the great deluge handed down; but during the 
Glacial period a belt of higher civilisation seems to have 
girdled the world on the borders of the northern tropic, and 
it was probably the remnants of ruined and engulphed king- 
doms of that zone from which the traditions have come down. 
