420 H. H. Soivorth — A Great Post- Glacial Flood. 



not only of the solid skeleton of the valley, but even more so of its 

 terraces. No such series of ravines aticl breaks in the terraces is 

 forthcoming however; but the latter rua continuously along the 

 flanks of the valleys. Again, how could the lateral dales of the 

 principal valleys be charged with these deposits up to their very 

 heads, as we actually find them, if the flow of these rivers of the 

 predicated Pluvial period was so enormous, and at the same time 

 continuously seaward ? These would surely have been washed 

 clean. How, again, could the terraces in such a case have had their 

 materials sifted in the way we have mentioned ? But Mr. Tylor 

 makes even greater demands upon our credulity. He asserts, and 

 has reiterated the opinion again quite recently in the pages of this 

 Magazine, that during the Pluvial period the rate of denudation was 

 nine inches per annum. Nine inches of solid strata removed every 

 year, when we have only to go to North Wales, or still better, to 

 Scandinavia, to see numerous faces of rock with the furrows carved 

 by the ice in the Glacial period still sharp, although exposed 

 to continuous subaerial denudation for unknown centuries, and 

 thence to gauge the real effects of rain and snow as denuding 

 agencies. Even if we could realize such stupendous efiects from 

 such causes, and if we could trace whither the debris of all this 

 scouring has gone to, we should still have to face an insuperable 

 difficulty. Mr. Tylor does not deny that during his Pluvial period 

 the land was occupied by a teeming life both Botanical and Zoologi- 

 cal, the remains of which so abovmd in the deposits we are dis- 

 cussing, but how was this life possible? How, with such a grinding 

 down of the surface, was it possible for plants, either the herbage 

 and grasses upon which the land-shells fed, or the forests where the 

 Mammoth lived, to grow at all ? How could the class of trees, of 

 which Saporta and others have furnished us lists, have lived under 

 such conditions ? How, again, could the animals do so ? Mr. Mellard 

 Eeade may well say that no mould could possibly form under these 

 circumstances except, perhaps, in deltas, as it would be removed one 

 hundred times as fast as made. Whichever way we view this 

 theory of a great Pluvial period, we are met by incorrigible difficul- 

 ties and contradictions, and we cannot avoid the conchision that it is 

 not based on inductive evidence, for it will not explain the facts, 

 but is rather another example of the danger of the Deductive method 

 in science. 



If we turn to the alternative hypothesis of Mr. Belt, we are in no 

 better position. His theory certainly has the merit of boldness. 



It is fair to quote it in his own words. He urges that " at the 

 height of the Glacial period, the bed of the Atlantic was occupied by 

 ice flowing from the north-west, from the direction of Greenland, 

 reaching trom the coast of Europe either at Brest or some other 

 point further south, and damming back the whole of the drainage of 

 Northern Europe into an immense lake of fresh water, which, at its 

 greatest extension, reached to a height of at least 1200 feet above the 

 present level of the sea. This lake was gradually lowered for some 

 hundreds of feet, probably by the deepening of a channel of outlet, 



