56  REVIEWS—THE OLD GLACIERS OF SWITZERLAND, ETC. 
the great old glaciers of the Oberland apparently opened out on the 
broad drift-covered territory that extends northward to the Jura, 
there is another point of resemblance. So similar in general structure 
and in all its adjuncts is this Drift with that of the north of Europe, 
that I see no reason whatever to doubt their identity. Toadd weight 
to this opinion, I may quote the high authority of Mr. Smith of 
Jordan Hill, who informed me, that he recollects seemg in the mu- 
seum at Berne, a neglected collection of Swiss shells, arctic in their 
grouping, and subfossil, like those of our Newer Pliocene beds; and 
in the museum at Geneva a similar collection, among which was Mya 
Udivalensis. Further, it is well known that in the superficial de- 
posits associated with these, the bones of the great hairy elephant (E. 
primigenius), and other mammalian remains, occur by the Lake of 
Geneva, at Winterthur, and in other places; and though no one that 
I know of, has yet attempted to prove the ploughing of drift out of the 
mouths of Swiss valleys by the older and larger glaciers, yet in every 
other respect the conditions are so identical, that I am prepared to ex- 
pect that this also will be proved, and I cannot resist the conclusion 
that, when glaciers filled the valleys of Wales, it was at that very time 
(the Newer Pliocene epoch) that the glaciers of Switzerland attaimed 
their great original extension. 
Further, in spite of the modern fact that far south of the equator, 
the cold is greater than in equivalent northern latitudes, it is difficult 
not to speculate on the probable existence of a climate perhaps colder 
for the whole world, during what is often called the glacial period; a 
period when not only the Alps, but all Scandinavia, were full of great 
rivers of ice descending to the sea; when the White Mountains of 
North America also had their glaciers, (as I was informed in 1857, in 
conversation with Agassiz,) and when the great glaciers of the Hima- 
Jayah, as described by Dr. Joseph Hooker, descended 5000 feet. 
below their present levels, the older moraines being in one instance 
only 9000 feet above the sea, whereas the present end of the glacier 
lies at a height of 14,000 feet. 
Another point often occurs to my mind,—what relation have these 
extinct glaciers to the human period? This is a subject on which we 
still are in the dark, but considering that im Newer Pliocene bone- 
caves, flint knives have been found, —there is reason to believe, coeval 
with elephants, rhinoceroses, and other Mammalia, partly extinct ;— 
and that in France, at Abbeville and Amiens, well formed flint. 
