THE GLACIAL PEKIOD AND THE EARTH-MOVEMENT HYPOTHESIS. 243 



known, the climate of all those regions was more or less 

 profoundly affected during the glacial period. To account for 

 the wide-spread evidences of glaciation by means of elevation 

 it would therefore seem necessary to infer that all the 

 affected areas were in Pleistocene times uplifted en masse 

 into the Arctic zone that stretches above our heads. Now 

 it seems easier to believe that the snow-line was lowered by 

 several thousand feet than that the continents were elevated 

 to the same extent. Glaciation, as we have seen, was 

 developed in the same directions and over the same areas as 

 Ave should expect it to be were the snow-line to be generally 

 depressed. To put it in another way, were the snow-line by 

 some means or other to be lowered over Europe, Asia, and 

 North America, then, with sufficient precipitation, great ice- 

 fields and glaciers would re-appear in the very regions which 

 they visited during Pleistocene times. Neither elevation nor 

 depression of the land would be required to bring about such 

 a result. Certain advocates of the earth-movement hypo- 

 thesis, however, do not maintain that all the glaciated areas 

 were uplifted at one and the same time. The glaciation of 

 the Alps, they flunk, may have taken place earlier or later 

 than that of North- Western Europe, while the ice-period of 

 the Rocky Mountains may not have coincided with that of 

 Eastern North America. It is not impossible, they suppose, 

 that the glaciation of the Himalaya may have been caused by 

 an uplifting of that great chain, cvuite independent of similar 

 earth-movements in other places. It can be demonstrated, 

 however, that the glaciation of the Alps and of Northern 

 Europe were contemporaneous and the facts go far to prove 

 that the glaciers of the Rocky Mountains and the inland-ice of 

 North-East America likewise co-existed. At all events all 

 the old glacial accumulations of our hemisphere are of Pleis- 

 tocene age, and it is for the advocates of the hypothesis 

 under review to prove that they are not really contempo- 

 raneous. Their doubts on the subject probably arise from 

 the simple fact that they are well aware how highly improb- 

 able or even impossible it is that all those glaciated lands 

 could have been pushed up within the snow-line at one and 

 the same time. 



Let me, however, advance to another objection. We know 

 that the glacial period was interrupted by at least one inter- 

 glacial epoch of temperate and even genial conditions. Two 

 glacial epochs with one protracted interglacial epoch are now 

 generally admitted. How do the supporters of the earth- 



