366 Reviews—Sir H. Howorth’s Glacial Nightmare. 
pages, seems to me to be complete, not only because it adequately 
explains the facts, but because it is the only theory that does so, and 
I know nothing against it, but the almost pathetic devotion of a 
large school of thinkers to the Religion founded by Hutton, whose 
High Priest was Lyell, and which in essencé is based on d priori 
arguments like those which dominated medizval scholasticism and 
made it so barren.” 
Truly, time brings its revenges! The school of Cataclysmists and 
Convulsionists, which, 25 years ago, we believed had entirely died 
out, has found a most powerful advocate in Sir Henry Howorth. 
Even the most extreme of glacialists must feel a glow of satisfaction 
in the thought that their opponent advances cataclysmic views as 
piping hot as theirs are frigidly cold. 
Humboldt’s Jorullo, run up in a single night, is as a rushlight to 
the mighty Himalayas jerked up by Sir Henry Howorth in a week ! 
Nor can the glacialists pretend to any chance of competition with 
the author in monster Ice-sheets compared with a Flood so extensive 
as he presents for our immersion. 
Assuming Sir Henry Howorth is right in his theory and all other 
geologists wrong, how comes it that the pigmy descendants of the 
giant sloths and the mighty Glyptodon should be found occupying 
the same area in South America as their huge forefathers, and that 
the extinct Diprotodon and Nototherium of Australia should be repre- 
sented by corresponding but lesser living forms of Marsupials in that 
area to day? May not each and all the changes in the mammalian 
and avian faunas of the various great regions of the earth have been 
due to causes which have acted independently in each great area, 
and which may have been brought about by very distinct and 
separate agencies? ‘Thus the great Marsupialia of Australia may 
have owed their extermination to a succession of dry seasons, which, 
as Sir Richard Owen pointed out, always affect the larger animals 
first, by producing scarcity of food and water. The great Dinorni- 
thide in New Zealand probably owed their extermination partly to 
forest-fires, but chiefly to the arrival of the Maoris, who doubtless 
lived upon them as long as any remained. 
The giant Edentata of South America may have gradually suc- 
cumbed to local floods, from which their terrestrial habits and their 
bulk afforded them no escape, whereas their smaller relatives, 
perhaps, by greater activity and arboreal habits, may have survived. 
The gigantic Irish Deer may well have perished, in its final insular 
and limited home, from wolves, or wet seasons, which the altered 
land-conditions, due to the subsidence of the Irish Sea-valley (once 
dry land), may have brought about. 
Be the causes what they may, it appears to us most unphilosophical 
to attempt to connect the extinction of all these animals, living in such 
widely-separated countries, with one overwhelming debacle, and to 
denounce the followers of uniformitarianism and condemn their tenets 
as unsound, yet at the same time to offer a universal deluge as the sure, 
safe and only panacea for all Pleistocene geological difficulties ! 
So nearly do the author’s researches and results approach the 
subject of what is usually termed the Universal or Mosaic Deluge, 
