i6 THE ICE AGE 



of the Great Ice Age does not explain the 

 wiping out even in North America of the 

 camel, elephant, tapir and horse. 



It has been my good fortune to make a series 

 of voyages to Bering Sea and Norway in the 

 winter, and in summer along the flanks of both 

 the St. Elias and the Greenland ice-caps. In 

 these journeys by sail and steam, in boats, in 

 canoes, with many landings and scrambles 

 across country, I was able to test the theories 

 of Glacialogists against the actual facts of the 

 Great Ice Age. 



The. Croll theory makes the orbit of the 

 Earth to change at regular intervals into a 

 long ellipse. By roasting one entire hemis- 

 phere it provides vapour to cover the whole of 

 the other hemisphere with snows which do not 

 melt. Evidence is scratched up and made 

 the most of for previous ice ages. An imagi- 

 nary series of cosmic cataclysms is invoked to 

 explain one merely local unpleasantness. 



Another theory sinks Central America — 

 politically quite a good idea — and throws the 

 Gulf Stream into the Pacific, leaving the North 

 Atlantic to be frozen. It does not explain the 

 American lobe of the icefield which brushed 

 the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a 

 region outside the influence of the Gulf Stream. 



