

CHAP. XV. COLD PEKIOD IN SICILY AND SYRIA. 323 



widely separated as are the mountains of Scandinavia, the 

 British Isles, and the Alps, or the times of the advance and 

 retreat of glaciers in those several regions, and the greater 

 or less intensity of cold, must be looked upon as very con 

 jectural. 



We may presume with more confidence that when the Alps 

 were highest and the Alpine glaciers most developed, filling 

 all the great lakes of northern Italy, and loading the plains 

 of Piedmont and Lombardy with ice, the waters of the Me 

 diterranean were chilled and of a lower average temperature 

 than now. Such a period of refrigeration is required by the 

 conchologist to account for the prevalence of northern shells 

 in the Sicilian seas about the close of the newer pliocene or 

 commencement of the post-pliocene period. For such shells 

 as Cyprina islandica, Natica clausa, and some others, enu 

 merated among the fossils of the latest tertiary formations 

 of Sicily by Philippi and Edward Forbes, point unequivocally 

 to a former more severe climate. Dr. Hooker also, in his 

 late journey to Syria (in the autumn of 1860), found the 

 moraines of extinct glaciers, on which the whole of the ancient 

 cedars of Lebanon grow, to descend 4,000 feet below the 

 summit of that chain. The temperature of Syria is now so 

 much milder, that there is no longer perpetual snow even on 

 the summit of Lebanon, the height of which was ascertained 

 to be 10,200 feet above the Mediterranean.* 



Such monuments of a cold climate in latitudes so far south 

 as Syria and the north of Sicily, between 33 to 38 north, 

 may be confidently referred to an early part of the glacier 

 period, or to times long anterior to those of man and the ex 

 tinct mammalia of Abbeville and Amiens. 



* Hooker, Natural History Keview, No. 5, January 1862, p. 11. 



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