256 PROFESSOR JAMES GEIKIE, LL.D., D.C.L., E.R.S., ETC., ON 



during Pleistocene or Quaternary time than Professor Geikie 

 himself, who, with Ramsay, has proved that the earth's crust at 

 the Strait of Gibraltar, since the end of the Tertiary era, has been 

 repeatedly uplifted much above its present height, allowing African 

 animals to cross on dryland into Europe (Quarterly Journal of the 

 Geological Society, London, vol. xxxiv, 1878, pp. 505-541), and 

 who also believes that a land connection existed during the Glacial 

 period from Britain to the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland 

 (Prehistoric Europe, 1881, pp. 518-522, and 568, with Plate E). 

 In Professor Geikie's admirable memoir on the geology of the 

 Fteroe Islands (Trans. Boy. Soc. Edinb., vol. xxx, 1882, pp. 217— 

 269), he shows that a vast amount of erosion has been effected 

 there, and in like manner upon other lands bordering the North 

 Atlantic, since the Miocene period. In comparison with the late 

 Tertiary erosion so impressively exhibited, it is easy to accept the 

 view that the deep but narrow Scandinavian fjords belong to a 

 geologically short stage of great uplift during the late Pliocene 

 and early Pleistocene epochs. The rivers continued to flow along 

 the bottoms of these fjords until the increasing elevation of the 

 land, as I think, brought on the ice-sheets, beneath which the land 

 sank somewhat below its present height. 



It is true that the duplication of glacial epochs accords beauti- 

 fully with Croll's astronomic theory, which for several years met 

 with general acceptance in America as well as in Europe. But the 

 recency of the latest glaciation on both continents, which has been 

 well stated by Wright, N. H. Winchell, Andrews, Gilbert, and 

 Russell in American publications, and by Mackintosh, Southall, 

 and others in the Journal of Transactions of the Victoria Institute 

 (vol. xiii, and especially vol. xix, pp. 73-92), showing that the 

 length of the postglacial epoch has been no more than 6,000 to 

 10,000 years, is inconsistent with the reference of that glaciation 

 to astronomic conditions which ended 80,000 years ago. 



Before receiving this Paper by Professor Geikie, I had it in 

 mind to send, for some meeting of the Victoria Institute next 

 year, a review of the principal theories which have been held to 

 account for the climate of the Ice age ; and in that Paper I hope 

 to present more fully the grounds for my view as here briefly 

 noted, and the difficulties which seem to me to forbid the accept- 

 ance of the other two theories which Evans and Croll proposed 

 nearly thirty years ago. 



