. 133 



marine or boulder formation of the northern part of the Americati 

 continent. For, as there can exist no doubt, that whenever and 

 wherever these shells were deposited, whether at Uddevalla in Swe- 

 den, near Archangel in Russia, in Great Britain or in America as far 

 south even as Lake Champlain, a very cold climate must have pre- 

 vailed ; and as such submarine accumulations were elevated and 

 formed land before the great mammals in question appeared ; so it 

 is manifest, as Mr. Lyell remarks, that these creatures could not 

 have been destroyed by the same cold as that which gave rise to the 

 Arctic shells, and with them to the correlative phasnomenon of the 

 transport of great boulders and the scratching and scorings of rocks. 

 This clear reasoning appears to me to be an unanswerable refutation 

 of a leading feature of the glacial theory as propounded in its widest 

 sense. At the same time it must be admitted, that the surface of 

 Great Britain does not offer the same neat division between a for- 

 mer submai'ine state and beds containing the remains of extinct quad- 

 rupeds, as the continent of America. In some cases, it is true, 

 as at Market Weighton, described by Mr. W. Vernon Harcourt, 

 there are accumulations of bones which lay in fine shelly clay, 

 with gravel below and gravel above the clay, indicating changes 

 from teiTestrial and freshwater to submarine conditions. The 

 Brighton breccia of Dr. Mantell is a fine example of a thick 

 detrital mass, of whose grandeur, and of the poM'erful agents by 

 which it was heaped up, any one who looks at its composition and 

 at the extraordinary erosion of the surface of the chalk on which it 

 rests, will be convinced; and the bones of elephants are impacted 

 in the very heart of this mass. 



Nay, nearly the whole of the clifi^s of the eastern shores of En- 

 gland, and large tracts in Norfolk and Holderness in Yorkshire, ex- 

 hibit, as you know, boulder and detrital accumulations of very tu- 

 multuary characters, in which the remains of these great mammals 

 are entombed, sometimes, indeed, mixed up with broken fragments 

 of the same species of shells which in America, it would appear, lie 

 always beneath such bone deposits. 



Seeing, therefore, these great differences in the character of the 

 evidence, to what other conclusion can we come, than that the de- 

 struction of these great animals commenced at earlier j^eriods in 

 some regions than in others ; and that, whilst in America a gradual 

 and steady elevation of the land has preserved records of tracts, 

 which, never since submerged, have been inhabited by succes- 

 sive races of quadrupeds, other countries have been affected from 

 earlier periods by unequal and perhaps more intense oscillations, by 

 which the relations of these animals to submarine and terrestrial 

 conditions have been rendered much more obscure ? In a word, 

 the surface of the earth exhibits, in some of its last phases, num- 

 berless proofs that no simultaneous general destruction of any such 

 lost races can have taken place ; but that each great region, when 

 studied in itself, presents, in the extended sense of the word, local 

 phaenomena of accumulation, destruction and renewal. 



