640 THE JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY. 
how long would the Malaspina and other Alaskan glaciers hold 
their ground? 
At Toronto during one part of this inter-glacial time we had 
a climate, judging by the flora and fauna, far milder and drier 
than that of Alaska; and, nothing that can be called a mountain 
rises between this and Hudson Bay. The inter-glacial time was 
long enough not only to allow of the deposit of the thick beds 
of sand and clay that have been described, but to allow the great 
body of water in which they were formed to be drained to a depth 
of one hundred and fifty feet, and the new land surface to be 
deeply eroded. At the Dutch Church, for instance, a valley was dug 
a mile in width trom edge to edge and a quarter of a mile wide 
at the lowest level exposed by Lake Ontario.*. All of this must 
have demanded time and plenty of it. Can any one believe that 
meantime, while elms and oaks and maples, not to mention the 
papaw, were growing along the Don, the ice-field, with no lofty 
slopes to supply gathering ground for névé, was lurking a few miles 
off, ready to advance and overwhelm the deciduous forests ? 
It has been pointed out in a previous paper that Toronto lies 
not more than 500 miles from Hudson Bay or 700 from the cen- 
ter of Labrador, with no mountains intervening.? There seems 
no more reason to assume that a great ice-field existed within those 
distances while the Don fossils were being buried than there is 
to assume it at the present day. As a whole, then, the evidence 
at Toronto seems to support strongly the theory of Geikie, Cham- 
berlin and others as to the distinct ice ages separated by mild 
inter-glacial times. 
The unfossiliferous clays and sands lying between the mid- 
dle and upper sheets of till and having a thickness of at least 
one hundred and sixty feet at Scarboro’, and of forty at Toronto, 
indicate a second recession of the ice. The absence of fossils, the 
presence, though rarely of angular striated pebbles in the 
clay, and the corrugated and crumpled beds here and there 
found among the upper sandy layers suggest a cold, perhaps 
*See Section of Scarboro’ Heights. 
2 Nite (EGOlle, WOll, SUNN, 5 © 
