114 J. W. DAWSON — SOME RECENT DISCUSSIONS IN GEOLOGY. 



a time measured by a few thousand years this continental period termi- 

 nated, and the continents subsided to their present limited dimensions, 

 permanently submerging some of the fairest portions of the former abodes 

 of man and for a time inundating vast areas of the land. It has, how- 

 ever, been a much debated question whether these great changes were 

 gradual or sudden, and whether they were connected with the disappear- 

 ance of palanthropic man and his contemporaries. I have myself long 

 maintained the conclusion that the human period is on good geologic 

 evidence divided into two portions by great earth-movements, and that 

 it is the historical traditions of these which constitute the foundation of 

 that universal belief of a deluge which has fixed itself in the memories 

 of ancient men in every part of the world. 



The great English geologist, Prestwich, has recently given much atten- 

 tion to this subject, and in a memoir in the Transactions of the Royal 

 Society of London * has adduced a mass of evidence on which he bases 

 the conclusion that an important movement of subsidence and reeleva- 

 tion occurred at the end of the Glacial or post-Glacial period, and was of 

 the character of a somewhat sudden inundation destructive of man and 

 animals. The deposits produced by the recession of the waters of this 

 inundation he designates "rubble-drift," a formation which overlies the 

 glacial deposits and indicates a movement of water distinct from any- 

 thing belonging to glacial phenomena or to ordinary river inundations. 

 He includes with this the deposits known as " head " in England and 

 also the loess of the plains and tablelands of Europe and the ma- 

 terial found in certain caves and fissures. He might have added some 

 of the gravels and superficial deposits of Egypt and Syria, and modern 

 deposits extending far east into central and northern Asia. Thus we 

 now have geologic facts which show that man has been a witness of one 

 great continental submergence, which must have intervened between the 

 close of the Glacial period and the .present time. These facts at once 

 establish a remarkable correlation between the results of geologic investi- 

 gation and the historic deluge, and expose the fallacies of those theories 

 which assume an uninterrupted progress of man from his first appear- 

 ance until the present day. A curious confirmation of this has recently 

 been furnished by the excavations of Nuesch in a rock shelter near Schafi"- 

 hausen,t which show an overlying deposit with neolithic implements 

 and bones of recent animals, a bed of rubble and loam destitute of human 

 remains, and below this a bed containing bone implements, worked flints 

 and traces of cookery of the palanthropic period. The whole rests on a 

 bed of rolled pebbles supposed to be the upper part of the glacial de- 



*Vol. 184, 18<)3, p. 903. 



fNouvelles Archives des Missions, etc., vol. iii; noticed in Natural Science, 1893. 



