South America. 553 
den, near Archangel in Russia, in Great Britain or in America as far 
south even as Lake Champlain, a very cold climate must have pre- 
vailed; and as such submarine accumulations were elevated and 
formed land before the great mammals in question appeared ; so it 
is manifest, as Mr. Lyell remarks, that these creatures could not 
have been destroyed by the same cold as that which gave rise to the 
Arctic shells, and with them to the correlative phenomenon of the 
transport of great boulders and the scratching and scorings of rocks. 
This clear reasoning appears to me to be an unanswerable refutation 
of a leading feature of the glacial theory as propounded in its widest 
sense. At the same time it must be admitted, that the surface of 
Great Britain does not offer the same neat division between a for- 
mer submarine state and beds containing the remains of extinct quad- 
rupeds, as the continent of America. In some cases, it is true, 
as at Market Weighton, described by Mr. W. Vernon Harcourt, 
there are accumulations of bones which lay in fine shelly clay, 
with gravel below and gravel above the clay, indicating changes 
from terrestrial and freshwater to submarine conditions. The 
Brighton breccia of Dr. Mantell is a fine example of a thick 
detrital mass, of whose grandeur, and of the powerful agents by 
which it was heaped up, any one who looks at its composition and 
at the extraordinary erosion of the surface of the chalk on which it 
rests, will be convinced; and the bones of elephants are impacted 
in the very heart of this mass. 
Nay, nearly the whole of the cliffs of the eastern shores of En- 
gland, and large tracts in Norfolk and Holderness in Yorkshire, exe 
hibit, as you know, boulder and detrital accumulations of very tu- 
multuary characters, in which the remains of these great mammals 
are entombed, sometimes, indeed, mixed up with broken fragments 
of the same species of shells which in America, it would appear, lie 
always beneath such bone deposits. 
Seeing, therefore, these great differences in the character of the 
evidence, to what other conclusion can we come, than that the de- 
struction of these great animals commenced at earlier periods in 
some regions than in others; and that, whilst in America a gradual 
and steady elevation of the land has preserved records of tracts, 
which, never since submerged, have been inhabited by succes- 
sive races of quadrupeds, other countries have been affected from 
earlier periods by unequal and perhaps more intense oscillations, by 
which the relations of these animals to submarine and terrestrial 
conditions have been rendered much more obscure? In a word, 
the surface of the earth exhibits, in some of its last phases, num- 
berless proofs that no simultaneous general destruction of any such 
lost races can have taken place; but that each great region, when 
studied in itself, presents, in the extended sense of the word, local 
phenomena of accumulation, destruction and renewal. 
Sourn AMERICA. 
This year is marked by a great accession to our acquaintance 
with South America, by the appearance of the splendidly illus- 
Phil. Mag. 8. 3. No, 148. Suppl. Vol. 22. 2 
