ADDRESS. 17 



hippopotami and other creatures either became entirely extinct or were 

 driven into the Mediterranean basin and into Africa. In their place came 

 northern forms — the reindeer, glutton, musk ox, woolly rhinoceros, and 

 mammoth. 



Such a marvellous transformation in climate, in scenery, in vegetation 

 and in inhabitants, within what was after all but a brief portion of geo- 

 logical time, though it may have involved no sudden or violent convul- 

 sion, is surely entitled to rank as a catastrophe in the history of the 

 globe. It was probably brought about mainly if not entirely by the 

 operation of forces external to the earth. No similar calamity having 

 befallen the continents within the time during which man has been re- 

 cording his experience, the Ice Age might be cited as a contradiction to 

 the doctrine of uniformity. And yet it manifestly arrived as part of the 

 established order of Nature. Whether or not we grant that other ice ages 

 preceded the last great one, we must admit that the conditions under 

 which it arose, so far as we know them, might conceivably have occurred 

 before and may occur again. The various agencies called into play by 

 the extensive refrigeration of the northern hemisphere were not different 

 from those with which we are familiar. Snow fell and glaciers crept as 

 they do to-day. Ice scored and polished rocks exactly as it still does 

 among the Alps and in Norway. There was nothing abnormal in the 

 phenomena save the scale on which they were manifested. And thus, 

 taking a broad view of the whole subject, we recognise the catastrophe, 

 while at the same time we see in its progress the operation of those same 

 natural processes which we know to be integral parts of the machinery 

 whereby the surface of the earth is continually transformed. 



Among the debts which science owes to the Hattonian school, not the 

 least memorable is the promulgation of the first well-founded concep- 

 tions of the high antiquity of the globe. Some six thousand years had 

 previously been believed to comprise the whole life of the planet, and 

 indeed of the entire universe. When the curtain was then first raised 

 that had veiled the history of the earth, and men, looking beyond the 

 brief span within which they had supposed that history to have been 

 transacted, beheld the records of a long vista of ages stretching far away 

 into a dim illimitable past, the prospect vividly impressed their imagina- 

 tion. Astrouomy had made known the immeasurable fields of space; the 

 new science of geology seemed now to reveal boundless distances of time. 

 The more the terrestrial chronicles were studied the farther could the 

 eye range into an antiquity so vast as to defy all attempts to measure or 



1892. c 



