THE GLACIAL PERIOD AND THE EARTH-MOVEMENT HYPOTHESIS. 231 



glaciation, and certainly before the periodicity of ice-epochs 

 had been recognised, Collomb had detected in the Vosges 

 conspicuous evidence of two successive glaciations.* 



Having shown that alike in the regions formerly occupied 

 by the great northern ice-sheet, and in the Alpine lands of 

 Central and Southern Europe, alternations of cold and genial 

 conditions characterised the so-called glacial period, we may 

 now glance at the evidence supplied by those Pleistocene 

 deposits that lie outside of the glaciated areas. Of these we 

 have a typical example in the river-accumulations of the 

 Rhine valley between Bale and Bingen. Here and there these 

 deposits have yielded remains of extinct and no longer 

 indigenous mammals and relics of Palaeolithic man — one of 

 the most interesting deposits from which mammalian remains 

 have been obtained, being the Sands of Mosbach, between 

 Wiesbaden and Mayence. The fauna in question is charac- 

 teristically Pleistocene, nor can it be doubted that the Mosbach 

 Sands belong to the same geological horizon as the similar 

 fluviatile deposits of the Seine, the Thames, and other river- 

 valleys in Western Europe. Dr. Kinkelin has shown,f and 

 with him Dr. Schumacher agrees,:}: that the Mosbach deposits 

 are of interglacial age ; while Dr. Pohlig has no hesitation 

 in assigning them to the same horizon. § It is true there are 

 no glacial accumulations in the region where they occur, but 

 they rest upon a series of unfossiliferous gravels which are 

 recognised as the equivalents of the fluvio-glacial and glacial 

 deposits of the Vosges, the Black Forest, the Alps, etc. These 

 gravels are traced at intervals up to considerable heights 

 above the Rhine, and contain numerous erratics, some of 

 which are several feet in diameter, while a large proportion 

 are not at all waterworn, but rough and sharply angular. 

 The blocks have unquestionably been transported by river-ice, 

 and imply therefore cold climatic conditions. The overlying 

 Mosbach Sands have yielded not only Elephas antiquus and 

 Hippopotamus major, but the reindeer, the mammoth, and the 

 marmot — two strongly contrasted faunas, betokening climatic 



* Preuves de I 'existence d'anciens glaciers dans les valle'es des Vosges, 1847, 

 p. 141. 



t Kinkelin : Bericht fiber die Senckenberg. naturf. Ges. in Frankfurt 

 a. M., 1889. 



| Schumacher : Mittheitungen d. Commission fiir d. geolog. Landes- 

 Untersuch. v. Elsass-Lothringen, Bd. ii, 1890, p. 184. 



§ Zeitschr. d. dcutsch. geolog. Ges., 1887, p. 806. 



