Western Asia and Eastern Europe, etc. 63 



frankly that though traces of glacial action are not entirely absent, 

 yet they are insignificant (anbedeutend). In the Liptan Mountains, 

 he says, are some uncertain traces ; but he himself had failed to 

 find any evidence over a considerable stretch of the Central 

 Carpathians. Paul and Tieze had, however, noticed some moraines 

 on the Cherna hora, the highest part of the Eastern Carpathians, 

 2007 metres high, whence the Theiss and White Pruth spring 

 {id. p. 599). 



It seems to me that the evidence forthcoming to show that the 

 Carpathians partook in the general glacial phenomena which have 

 left such important and unmistakable traces in the much inferior 

 ranges further west, such as the Vosges, the Morvan, etc., is quite 

 unsatisfactory and insufficient, and that the problem should be again 

 examined on the spot by some inquirers who do not mistake every 

 heap of rolled stones for a moraine. It is incredible to me, if the 

 Carpathians had existed in the Glacial age at the time when the 

 mountains of Scotland and Ireland and Cumberland were loaded 

 with ice, that we should have to search so minutely over them for 

 any real traces of ice action, and to be actually limited to finding 

 them on two or three of their higher peaks. The view that the 

 further we go east in Europe, the smaller do the traces of glacial 

 action become, had already occurred to others. 



Penck says that Peschel was the first to observe (Volkerkunde, 

 1877, p. 43) that traces of glacial phenomena diminish in Europe 

 as we go East. Of the three South German mountain ranges the 

 Vosges present the greatest traces of glaciation, while in the Alps 

 the intensity of the phenomena diminishes as we go East, and the 

 Western Alps must have been more thickly covered with ice than 

 the Eastern. The same is the case in America ; only that there the 

 intensity of glaciation diminishes as we go west. While the low- 

 lying lands in the east of that continent were covered with ice, the 

 mountain region on the west coast only harboured local glaciers 

 (Penck, Vergletscherung der Deutschen Alpen, p. 438). 



The evidence seems to me to point to the Carpathians being a 

 very recent feature in European physical geography, and, as in the 

 case of the Balkans, the Taurus, in Asia Minor, the Caucasus (per- 

 haps the Lebanon and the Atlas), and the Elburz Mountains, to 

 their not having been in existence during the Glacial age, of whose 

 unmistakable handiwork they bear no adequate traces. 



I have endeavoured in the recent papers which you have done me 

 the favour to print to meet the demand of those geologists who have 

 asked me for a cause competent to produce such a diluvial move- 

 ment as I have postulated at the close of the Mammoth age, and 

 which seems to be attested by a great mass of evidence. I have 

 tried to collect a certain number of facts to show that at the close of 

 the epoch in question there was a very violent and widespread dis- 

 location of the earth's crust, which led to the upheaval of some of 

 its loftiest mountain chains. This upheaval was accompanied, as I 

 believe, by an equally rapid and substantial subsidence in other 

 places, of which also there is much evidence, some of which you 



