682 ■ JAMES GEIKIE 



episodes of the past, and ought to be recognized in our classification 

 as constituting a distinct division of time. By refusing to do so, and 

 including the Wey bourn Crag, the Cromer Forest bed, etc., in the 

 PHocene, we cut off from the Pleistocene the earliest recognizable 

 glacial and interglacial epochs; and we similarly separate from the 

 great cycle its closing phases when we classify these as postglacial. 

 So far as temperate Europe is concerned, it is only the present which 

 is postglacial. 



How many cHmatic oscillations may eventually be included in 

 the so-called glacial period we cannot tell. If we confine attention 

 to such glacial and interglacial stages as are actually known, it would 

 seem that the chmax of each phase was attained in early Pleistocene 

 times. After that cKmax was passed, each successive glacial and 

 interglacial epoch dechned in importance — the contrast between 

 the two phases gradually became less pronounced. Interglacial 

 conditions reached their maximum with the advent in our latitude 

 of the great southern pachyderms — hippopotamus, elephant, and 

 others — and died out with the Upper Forest Zone of our peat-mosses. 

 Glacial conditions culminated with the appearance of the enormous 

 ice-sheet of the Saxonian stage, and finally disappeared, so far as 

 Scotland was concerned, with the small isolated snow-fields and 

 diminutive glaciers of our loftiest Highland mountains. 



