Reviews — Southairs Epoch of the Mammoth. 359 



France, in England, in tlie valley of the Tiber, in the valley of the 

 Mississippi, and elsewhere, there is no doubt — what Dr. Andrews 

 designates as the Flood of the Loess.'" 



The sponsors for this flood are Messrs. D'Orbigny, Alfred Tylor, 

 Prof. Andrews, and Prof. Prestwich. Perhaps, in analogy to another 

 kind of sponsorship, these gentlemen hardly know what it is that 

 they undertake ! If we enlarge our view and take in the intervening 

 plains on which implements have been found in scattered gravels and 

 caves on hill-sides once at the water-level, we have phenomena which 

 cannot be accounted for by any single flood, or by any flood alone, 

 but require several floods, with intervening periods of repose, the 

 whole constituting a great mammalian epoch, during some part of 

 which man occupied and dwelt; after this there was more flood, 

 accompanied with considerable elevation and movement of the 

 surface. The problem is, how long did this post man-and-mammoth 

 period last ? Could it all have taken place within a limited period, 

 after the first appearance, and disappearance, and before the re- 

 appearance of man ? Can the geological phenomena between 

 the disappearance and reappearance of man be fairly explained on 

 the supposition of their occurrence within the lapse of, say, a 

 thousand years ? To these questions Dr. Southall's book brings no 

 direct reply. 



The gravels are still mysterious. The time and the force required 

 to rake off a surface of chalk, to roll its flints into pebbles, to 

 grind pebbles into sand, to wash another part of the contents into 

 coloured clays and fine sands, to expose beds of these to the winds 

 so as to create dunes, to have alternate land and water, alternate 

 still and violent waters, occasional inroads of the sea in places 

 now far beyond its reach, to have successive rises and depressions 

 of land, to have big mammals living, dying, and entombed, to 

 have surfaces of vegetation growing and again buried under 

 aerial or watery accumulations, to have man sufficiently settled 

 to cultivate at least some imitative arts, then a displacement and 

 a deluge, and then the slower reduction of rivers to present 

 channels, — these are a few of the difficulties which beset the travel- 

 ler in his journey amidst Palasolithic deposits. The gravels them- 

 selves furnish us with such an inconstant series, that many able 

 men who have given years of study to them are not yet agreed 

 on their chronology. Greological knowledge respecting their dura- 

 tion cannot at present be said to be conclusive either way ; and in 

 regard to geological time the " might have been " is not yet super- 

 seded by the authoritative " must," The advocates for both sides 

 are still entitled to hold and express their opinions, and if the 

 tendency of recent discovery and discussion has, as a fact, been 

 towards the adoption of the proposition put forward during the 

 infancy of the inquiry, that the mammalian epoch reached far nearer 

 down to our own day than was supposed ; yet who shall estimate 

 the duration of that period antecedent to human chronicles or even 

 traditions ? — to attempt to measure it by our feeble data, is like 

 taking, soundings in the ocean with a " two-foot rule " ! 



