534 ^rof. J. W. Judd— On Volcanos. 



myself to have failed to find a particle of proof in any of tlie works 

 describing the results of polar explorations. 



If, instead of speculating on what is going on beneath these 

 imaginary "polar ice-caps," we turn our attention to a country 

 which affords the grandest illustrations of glacial action in the 

 world — I refer to New Zealand — and which has had the advantage 

 of having been thoroughly explored by such competent observers as 

 Hector and Hochstetter, Haast and Hutton, not to mention many 

 others, we shall, I think, be led to frame opinions on the subject 

 which have the advantage of being more in harmony with all the 

 facts observed, both physical and palgeontological. 



New Zealand is situated some five degrees nearer to the equator 

 than are the Alpine regions of Europe ; yet, during very recent 

 periods in the world's history, the former district was subjected to 

 glacial action on the grandest conceivable scale, the remaining 

 monuments of which are of the most striking and unmistakable 

 character. Even the shrunken relics of those glaciers which still 

 remain are of a magnitude which make the existing Alpine glaciers 

 appear puny by comparison ; one of them extending to within 500 

 feet of the sea-level, in the midst of a country covered with tree- 

 ferns and palms. 



When these remarkable glaciers and the proofs of their former 

 greater extension were first described, the facts were of course 

 adduced by manj^ geologists as a proof that the whole globe had, 

 during certain periods, been subjected to secular refrigeration ; and 

 New Zealand was supposed to afford the strongest possible demon- 

 stration of the existence of " the Glacial Period." But the careful 

 study of all the evidence, especially the palgeontological, has com- 

 pelled the whole of the distinguished geologists we have named 

 above to entirely renounce their former views upon the subject, this 

 reform in opinion having been led by Dr. Hector in 1863. The 

 fossil shells belonging to the whole series of Tertiary and post- 

 Tertiary deposits prove conclusively that no such changes of 

 climate as are argued for by advocates of universal Glacial periods 

 ever took place in the Southern hemisj)here ; and these conclusions 

 of the New Zealand geologists are fully supported by those arrived 

 at by Professor M'Coy in Australia. 



Nor are the palgeontological facts pointing to the same conclusion 

 in the case of the Northern hemisphere less convincing. It has 

 been argued from the existence of large blocks, and the poverty of 

 the fauna in certain sub-Alpine deposits, that ''glacial epochs," or 

 a general refrigeration of climate in the Northern hemis^Dhere, 

 occurred both in the Eocene and Miocene periods. We shall not 

 stay to point out how cautiously the presence of merely transported 

 blocks — not exhibiting any glacial striation — should be accepted as 

 evidence of glacial action, in the face of the facts which have been 

 published by Mr. Drew concerning the composition of the "fans" 

 of the Himalaya. But, assuming that an extension of glacial action 

 did take place in the Alps during the Eocene and Miocene periods 

 respectively, that these "glacial periods" were of purely local and 



