COLD AND ICE ON THE EARTH 



North Sea as far south as London. Ice in that day 

 flowed in glaciers from the British Isles, eastwards from 

 Scotland into the hollow of the North Sea, and westwards 

 down all the clefts of the mountains, burying the western 

 isles and breaking off in icebergs that drifted far into 

 the Atlantic. Sir Archibald Geikie says that the 

 western margin of the ice-fields from the south-west of 

 Ireland to the North Cape of Norway must have pre- 

 sented a vast wall of ice 1200 to 1500 miles long and 

 hundreds of feet high like that great barrier which the 

 Antarctic explorers tell us frown on the waters that lap 

 the boundaries of the south polar land. Northern Europe 

 must have been like North Greenland of to-day. The 

 rock scratches tell us (since even the southern coast of 

 Ireland is intensely ice-worn) that the edge of ice must 

 have extended some distance beyond Cape Clear, rising 

 out of the sea with a precipitous front that faced to the 

 south. Thence the ice-cliff swung eastwards, passing 

 probably along the line of the British Channel and keep- 

 ing to the north of the valley of the Thames. Its 

 southern margin ran across what is now Holland and 

 skirted the high grounds of Westphalia, Hanover, and the 

 Hartz Mountains which probably barred its further 

 progress southward. "There is evidence that the ice 

 swept round into the lowlands of Saxony up to the chain 

 of the Erz, Riesen, and Sudenten Mountains, whence its 

 southern limit turned eastward across Silesia, Poland, and 

 Galicia, and then swung round to the north, passing 

 across Russia by way of Kieff and Nijni Novgorod to the 

 Arctic Ocean."" 



75 



