Sir H. Howorth — The Mammoth Age and the Glaciers. 161 



III, — The Mammoth Age was Contemporary with the Age of 

 Great Glaciers. 



By Sir Henry H. Howorth, K.C.I.E., M.P., F.R.S., F.G.S. 



friHERE has been a long and sustained discussion among geologists 

 I as to whether the Mammoth and its companions were pre- 

 Glacial, inter-Glacial, or post-Glacial, or whether they could not, 

 in fact, claim to have been both pre- and post- Glacial, and to have 

 lived through the Glacial age, whence the name of Dicyclotherium 

 proposed for the Mammoth by one writer. 



These discussions have all, it seems to me, been vitiated by the 

 postulate that the Drift, as we have it in Western Europe and North- 

 Eastern America, was distributed by ice-sheets or icebergs. In my 

 last published work I have devoted a large space to trying to prove 

 that this view is a mistaken one, and that while we have ample 

 evidence of there having at one time been much larger local glaciers, 

 where glaciers still exist, and of there having been glaciers in many 

 places where glaciers no longer exist, there is no satisfactory 

 evidence of great ice-sheets having existed or being even possible 

 and that it is impossible to assign the distribution of the Drift over a 

 large area where it occurs, either to ice-sheets, or to ice in any form. 

 On the other hand, I have argued that the Drift was very largely 

 distributed by water ; not by water acting by slow diurnal methods, 

 but by water moving under the impulse of a great catastrophe. If 

 this view be right it entirely alters the conditions of the problem 

 about the true epoch of the Mammoth and its companions. 



That the Drift, so far as our evidence goes, invariably overlies the 

 Mammoth beds where the latter are in situ I have argued at great 

 length in this Magazine, and have also adduced a great deal of 

 evidence to proA'^e it, and this evidence keeps growing. This means 

 that the catastrophe which distributed the Drift was subsequent to 

 the Mammoth age, and, in fact, I have argued that it was this very 

 catastrophe which overwhelmed the Mammoth and its companions. 

 I believe also that it was the final chapter in the history of the 

 so-called Glacial period (which ought really to be styled the period 

 of Great Glaciers), and that to it we must attribute almost entirely 

 the last changes in the configuration of large parts of the Earth's 

 surface of any importance. 



This means that while the distxibution of the Drift, as we find it, 

 was rapid and sudden and was contemporary with the extinction of 

 the Mammoth and its companions, the period of Great Glaciers which 

 immediately preceded that diluvial movement was also the period 

 during which the Mammoth and its companions flourished, and that 

 the great beasts and the Great Glaciers flourished side by side — were, 

 in fact, contemporaneous. This view, I submit, is in accordance 

 with the facts and best explains them. To put the case more con- 

 ci'etely, it is that while the Highlands of Scandinavia and Scotland, 

 the Jura and the Vosges in Europe, and the mountains of British 

 Columbia and the Laurentian Highlands in America, were nursing 

 large glaciers, the Lowlands in the same latitudes were occupied 



DECADE IV. — VOL. I. — NO. IV. 11 



