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enormous quantity of ice—a deluge of ice for a deluge of water. Then Sir 
William Thompson, of Glasgow, comes in with the opinion that it has taken 
from twenty millions to two hundred and forty millions of years for the 
cooling down of the earth to its present temperature; all this enormous 
thickness of ice having been in the intermediate period, while the slow 
cooling of the earth has been going on according to Sir William. 
There are, certainly, evidences of tropical and semi-tropical temperature 
even in the London basin. Is it not an extraordinary contradiction to 
assume that, while there are these tropical or semi-tropical indications, 
there was this ice-sheet? And furthermore, as to the termination of this 
period, how are we able to say that it has yet terminated? It is not so 
many years since an elephant, embedded in ice at the mouth of the river 
Lena, was disclosed by the breaking up of a great mass of ice, and there are 
similar things continually occurring now. The glaciers of the Alps are even 
now diminishing in volume, and this diminution may account for the 
circumstance referred to by the last speaker. Now, it seems to me that the 
paper read to-night has put forward one very remarkable circumstance 
namely, that more than one of our great boulders had evidently fallen from a 
great height, and had broken the rock underneath it. This, of course, indicates 
floating ice, which may have been carried on the waters of the Deluge. At the 
time I first made acquaintance with geology—when Cuvier had obtained his 
celebrity, and Buckland had published his Reliquiwe Diluviane—Cuvier 
remarked on the subject of the ice which had disclosed the elephant at the 
mouth of the Lena, that the cause must have been sudden. It must have 
been as sudden a cause which brought the animal into its position among the 
ice as the freezing up of the elephant itself; for it was so fresh when 
embedded in the glacial ice, that, when some thousands of years after- 
wards it was brought to view, the wild dogs fed upon its carcase. The 
skeleton is now preserved in the Museum at St. Petersburg. Cuvier 
remarks further, in regard to the causes to which the glacial period has beer 
attributed, one of them being the very slow alteration of the earth’s orbit, 
that no gradually operating cause, such as that which is imperceptible even 
in thousands of years, could possibly account for a sudden change of climate, 
which must evidently, at once, have frozen up that large animal in thick ice, 
and preserved it from the effects of a temperate atmosphere for thousands of 
years. If the cause were a universal Deluge, as Cuvier believed—and I do 
not know that we have had a greater geologist since—then I think it is time 
for us to re-consider the changes which the theories of geologists have 
been undergoing. They are evidently now working their way back from 
the 240,000 years ago, which is the date of the glacial epoch, as assumed 
by Professor Geikie, and which was further assumed by Mr. J. Scott Moore, 
in his Pre-glacial Man, and by Lyell, who supposes it may have 
occurred from that period to a million years ago. Surely this gradual 
diminution from a million of years, or hundreds of thousands, may lead us 
to hope that science is at length coming back to its older, and, I think, 
