412 Sir H. Soicorth — Recent Changes of Level. 



disruptions, and have even abruptly thrown enormous masses of 

 hard pebbly sediment under the rocks out of whose detritus they 

 have been derived " (J.R.G.S. vol. clxv.-vii. p. 33). 



The burden of the parable which I have been trying to preach in 

 this paper is that the catastrophe vphich involved the destruction of 

 the Mammoth and some of its companions involved not only the 

 upheaval of some important mountain chains, but the corresponding 

 subsidence of large areas in different parts of the world, both 

 movements having been sudden and cataclysmic. This conclusion 

 explains two facts which need explanation. In the first place it 

 affords a good and ample cause for the diluvian movement which 

 I have so often postulated, and which was deemed necessary by 

 geologists of as great distinction, acuteness, and experience as any 

 now living, and whose wisdom time will presently vindicate. It 

 also explains that form of the Glacial theory which an increasing 

 number of geologists are supporting, namely, the existence at a 

 recent geological date, not of portentous ice-caps and ice-sheets 

 caused by goodness knows what, and completely at issue with 

 the laws of mechanics and the deductions of astronomj^ but of 

 much larger glaciers where glaciers still exist, and of the recent 

 existence of glaciers vs^here glaciers no longer exist. This result, 

 some of us think, was due to changes within the earth itself, 

 and not to astronomical causes. Geographical reasons suffice to 

 create a climate at this moment at Yakutsk far exceeding in severity 

 any climate at places on the same latitude which purely astro- 

 nomical causes could induce. I believe that geographical changes 

 of a similar kind would suffice to build up the great glaciers of 

 Pleistocene times. If the British Isles were upheaved, so that 

 a large part of the Irish Sea and of the German Ocean were above 

 the sea-level it seems not improbable that the mountains of Scotland 

 and of Wales would nurse glaciers of their own. If this elevation 

 extended, as some very acute French geologists have urged, to 

 Switzerland, the glaciers of the Alps would be correspondingly 

 enlarged ; so with Scandinavia. If the United States and the country 

 to the north stood in Pleistocene times several thousand feet higher 

 than they do now, it would invariably follow that the Laurentian 

 highlands and the mountains of British Columbia would nurse, 

 as the evidence shows they nursed, large glaciers also. If Tasmania 

 were joined to Australia by the process of the general upheaval of 

 the land in those regions, there is no difficulty in understanding 

 how the mountains of Western Tasmania and of Victoria should also 

 have had glaciers of their own. Thus the postulate we stand upon 

 explains the facts as we read them. Of course it explains them on 

 the supposition that Sedgwick, and Conybeare, and Murchison, and 

 d'Archiac, and many other heroes of our science were not children 

 at their work, but acute and experienced philosophers, when they 

 argued that catastrophe is an indispensable factor in unravelling the 

 riddle of the earth. It also involves a breach with those modern 

 teachers of our science who, while professing to be shocked at the 

 very sound of the word cataclysm, do not scruple to raise up continents 



