no Mr. H. H. Howorth on 



pletely explained by an entirely different cause, as I shall 

 endeavour to show elsewhere. It certainly does not as I 

 hold support the theory of interglacial warm climates. If 

 alternating climates had occurred throughout all time no fact 

 would be so patently and clearly attested by plant and animal 

 remains, which form the best weather gauges we can obtain. 

 Boulders, scratched rocks, etc., are naturally indestructible, 

 and, if anything like a so-called glacial epoch had existed 

 during the enormous development of the tertiary period, 

 we should assuredly have found something to corre- 

 spond to the vast beds of rolled and unrolled stones, 

 the erratics, the till and the sands, which so unmistakably 

 mark the last geological age in these latitudes, nor would 

 the roches moutonnees, etc., be so conspicuously absent. We 

 should not have been driven to base our conclusion on the 

 existence of a few sporadic stones, with scratches from some 

 local bed of permian conglomerate, or be perpetually referred 

 to the brown coal deposit in that very difficult geological 

 area Zurich. We should not have had the advocates of 

 such a theory feverishly quoting and requoting these par- 

 ticular threadbare instances, so limited both in quantity and 

 in its geographical distribution, and proving, as I contend, 

 an entirely different conclusion. We should rather have 

 had evidence pouring in upon us from all sides, especially 

 from such undisturbed areas as the plains of Russia and 

 North Europe. As a matter of fact, we may traverse nearly 

 all the known world in the southern hemisphere, as well as 

 the northern, and whether we use the fauna and flora as a 

 test and measure of climate, or whether we use the more 

 solid and indestructible stony debris, we shall fail to find 

 evidence adequate to support the gigantic hypothesis, that 

 the earth has passed through a cycle of glacial and tem- 

 perate periods alternating with each other, and it seems 

 to me that it is only by focussing our attention on very 

 limited and small areas, and applying our induction from 



