136 J. F. CAMPBELL ON GLACIAL PERIODS, - 
in the latitudes of Greenland. That existing local glacial Asian 
climate is due to elevation and to atmospheric circulation. But 
some of the rocks in that region were formed at the bottom of a 
warm sea; for they contain Ammonites. Others are Silurian. 
That local Asian glacial climate results not from a glacial period, 
but from a great local change in level, and in the position of land 
and sea ; it is a result of normal atmospheric circulation, evaporation, 
and condensation, which must have gone on during geological time. 
I suppose that like changes have produced like effects throughout 
sedimentary geology. Scratched stones are in Permian rocks ; there 
may have been Lawrentian glaciers without any abnormal period of 
cold. So long as my knowledge of ice-records only reached to the 
borders of the Atlantic basin, something abnormal seemed necessary 
to account for the facts; but when I found that these large 
records are local, nothing abnormal was needed. ‘Things as they are 
account for things as they were. No signs of large glaciers are 
anywhere near lat. 37° N. about the Pacific basin on either side, in 
the Californian plains, in Oregon, or in Japan, or China about 
Shanghai, Hong-Kong, or Canton. I could find nothing glacial at 
Singapore, or in Java, or in Ceylon, or in India up to lat. 32°N.; but 
from lat. 27°-28° northwards, on the hills, sedimentary rocks which 
formed at the sea-bottom, and are the tops of the Himalayas, are 
high enough now to condense vapour into glaciers even in the same 
latitudes as the deserts of Arabia and the hottest regions on earth. 
Between August 1873 and May 1877 I went round Europe, round 
the world, and through India, searching for records of the ice-cap in 
vain. Instead of finding drifted stones nearer to the equator than 
drifting ice, which a glacial period requires, I have only been able 
to find drifted stones as far south as drifting ice, and only in one 
place, near St. Louis. JI have sought in vain for evidence to proye 
that the world’s climate has been colder, which I have been taught 
and once believed. Because all my facts taken together tell against 
Glacial periods, I have ceased to believe in them. Because these 
facts very clearly disprove the case made for the northern “ Ice- 
cap,” I refuse to accept an improbable theory as if it were prob- 
able or true. With these theories stand or fall those which were 
invented to account for them. 
Vast sheets of polar ice did not climb over the Alps, the Caucasus, 
the Himalayas, and the Rocky Mountains, leaving sharp ridges there 
between 11,000, 18,000, and 28,000 feet high. There is no record 
of the passage of any such ice-sheet in gaps between these mountain- 
chains, at Constantinople, about the Caspian, in the Punjab, on 
the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Polar glaciation and records of it 
belong to the Atlantic basin. I hold that the present ‘‘ Period” 
has existed on earth since the globe cooled a very long time ago, and 
that it will go on growing to the coldness of outer space while the 
world lasts. 
I beg to refer to the papers above mentioned and to this paper 
for facts on which my conclusion is based. 
My opinion is that the present is at least as cold as any “period” 
