CHAP. XT. COLD PERIOD 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 Ital}', and loading the plains 

 of Piedmont and Lombardy with ice, the waters of the Medi- 

 terranean 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, enume- 

 rated among the fossils of the latest tertiaiy formations of 

 Sicily by PhilipjDi 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 4000 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 

 extinct mammalia of Abbeville and Amiens. 



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



