British Association. 223 
rocks on which the Drift rests, and the occurrence of erratic blocks, 
smoothed and scratched, at the bottom of the same Drift.’ 
The great cold of this Glacial Period was next treated of; and full 
justice done to Escher von der Linth’s hypothesis, advanced eleven 
years ago, that, the region of the Sahara having but recently dried 
up (as Ritter had suggested), the Alpine Glaciers, and Europe in 
general, have felt the effects of a southern dry hot wind, the Sirocco 
or the Féhn, in place of the cool water-laden wind that came over 
that region, then a sea, within Post-tertiary times. ‘The researches 
and observations of Desor,* Martins, C. Laurent, Denzler, Escher, 
Irscher, and of Sir Charles himself, bear on this subject; and the Rev. 
H. B. Tristram has traced evidences of old sea-margins in Northern 
Africa; the ancient sea stretching from the Gulf of Cabes, in Tunis, 
to the north of Senegambia, with a width here and there of perhaps 
800 miles; the high lands of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunis, being then 
connected with Spain, Sicily, and South Italy, but separated from 
the rest of Africa by sea. So also Egypt shows a succession of 
river-terraces (Adams and Murie), and the Red Sea has ‘raised 
beaches,’ that point to alterations of level in the same Post-tertiary 
times. 
The hydrographic arrangements of North Africa will thus have 
tended to increase the cold of Europe; and there are reasons for 
supposing the Alps to have been 2000 or 8000 feet higher then than 
they are now—another cause for greater glaciers there; the Gulf- 
stream also probably had not the same course as at present: and Sir 
Charles reminds us further ‘that the height and quantity of land near 
the north pole was greater at the era in question than it is now,’ 
and thus ‘go far to account for the excessive cold which was de- 
veloped at so modern a period of the earth’s history.’ That period, 
though full of great changes, in a long eventful succession, was but 
brief, geologically speaking,—‘a mere episode in one of the great 
epochs of the earth’s history; for the inhabitants of the lands and 
seas, before and after the grand development of snow and ice, were 
nearly the same.’ 
Though it has not been proved that Man existed in the Glacial 
Period, yet evidences of his existence are found in early Post- 
glacial times, when the climate was colder than now, and when the 
configuration of the surface differed much from that which now pre- 
vails. ‘Valleys have been deepened and widened, the course of 
subterranean rivers, which once flowed through caverns, has been 
changed, and many species of wild quadrupeds have disappeared’ 
since the Flint-folk left their implements of stone to be mingled, in 
the fluviatile Drifts of the Somme and elsewhere, with the bones of 
the extinct Elephant, Rhinoceros, Bear, Tiger, and Hyena. Flint 
implements of the same old fashion have been found near Madrid, by 
De Verneuil and L. Lartet, with fossil teeth of the African elephant, 
which species lived also in Sicily, probably with Man (Baron Anca). 
‘ We have now, therefore, evidence of Man having co-existed in 
* See Guoroaican Maaazinn, No. 1. 
