CAUSE FOE THE OPJGIN OP THE TRADITION OF THE FLOOD. 289 



diflBcnlty. It is extremely difficult to discuss it amongst a mixed 

 audience, and still more so when several champions of very different 

 views are prepared with grape shot on one's flank every moment. 

 I hope you will pardon the siraile, because I hold this, and I am 

 sure you will hold it, every one of you, that no opinion deserves to 

 live unless it can survive a very hard struggle indeed, and no 

 scientific heretic has a right to expect quarter until he establishes 

 liis claim by testing every objection. That I hold strongly. I am 

 not going to put you to the test to-night, but I will put one or 

 two facts before you to turn over in your mind as you go home. 



In the first place, I look upon this rubble drift of Professor 

 Prestwich's as being only one out of a series of phenomena which 

 all point in one direction. The rubble drift on the coasts of 

 France right away to Normandy, shades off and passes on 

 gradually into what the French call red and grey diluvium. This 

 form of diluvium covers the north of France irrespective of the 

 contour of the country, and lies in great homogeneous beds with- 

 out stratification, and covers hill and dale irrespective of valley or 

 hill, and this same great deposit of brick clay again passes 

 insensibly into deposits of loess, and passes into the great valley of 

 the Danube, and over two-thirds of Southern Russia, where my 

 own observation stops, but according to Ermann and others, it 

 extends right across Siberia until it reaches China. Beds of loess 

 exist over the Pampas of South America, and Darwin says nothing- 

 struck him with such surprise and delight as the exploration of 

 that immense mass of loam many yards thick with no stratification, 

 which covers the whole Pampas district of Soxith America. 



I have always held, since I was a small boy, that no possible 

 river action or any mere local force can explain this enormous 

 spread of continuous loam and other associated deposits, without 

 those signs of stratification which would be there if it had been 

 deposited by rivers by annual layers of warp or silt — this forma- 

 tion which exists perfectly without any break whatever. This 

 always seems to me to involve an appeal to some great continuous 

 cause. Again, as to the remains that have been found in it. It is a 

 most extraordinary thing that skeletons have been found, from the 

 east part of Siberia right away to Mecklenburg, of the mammoth 

 and great rhinoceros, without the disturbance of a single bone. 

 In Siberia they have found carcasses with the flesh intact. In the 

 north of Russia I have seen a skeleton, found in siln without 



