THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 173 



suggested that perhaps some mighty earthquake-shock or sudden 

 upheaval of a mountain-chain, or of the sea-bottom, had been 

 the cause of the deluges. Few, however, had the boldness to 

 enter into particulars, and in this respect they were more 

 cautious than Pallas, who, in order to account for the presence 

 of bones, tusks, skeletons, and carcasses of elephants, in the 

 alluvial deposits of Northern Siberia, had made the extraordinary 

 suggestion that a tremendous dSdcle might have swept them 

 north from India — a cUbdcle which he attributed to the great 

 eruptions that had produced the Moluccas, Philippines, and 

 other islands of volcanic origin in the Indian Ocean. But we 

 must remember that a century has elapsed since Pallas wrote, 

 and his theoretical notions, however wild they may appear to 

 us, would not seem so to his contemporaries. In the many 

 " theories of the earth " which were current in his time, one 

 may read of still more startling hypotheses. We are told, for 

 example, by St. Pierre, that the Deluge was caused by the 

 simultaneous sudden melting of two vast and towering cupolas 

 of ice that covered the Poles, the waters from which, rushins in 

 two enormous cUbdcles from north and south, overwhelmed all 

 the low grounds of the world. " Complete islands of floating 

 ice," he says, " loaded with white bears, ran aground among the 

 palm-trees of the torrid zone, and the elephants of Africa were 

 tossed amidst the fir-groves of Siberia, where their large bones 

 are still found to this day." At a more recent date we encounter 

 another curious view advanced by the celebrated French geolo- 

 gist, Elie de Beaumont, who accounted for the transport of 

 erratic ddbris from the Alps by means of enormous currents 

 derived from the sudden meltings of the snows upon the lofty 

 heights of the Eastern Alps — " qui ont du etre fondues en mi 

 instant par les gaz auxquels est attribute l'origine des dolomies 

 et des gypses." 1 This strange notion also commended itself to 

 Collegno, who endeavoured by similar means to explain the 

 glacial phenomena of the Pyrenees. 2 



1 Sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe, p. 285. 

 3 Ann. des Sci. Nat., t. ii. p. 191 ; Bull. Soc. Geol. France, 1" Ser. t. xiv. p. 402. 



